|
Slain berg friends recall dangerous taste for risk { May 14 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=510918§ion=newshttp://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=510918§ion=news
Slain Berg's friends recall dangerous taste for risk
Fri 14 May, 2004 16:23
By Joseph Logan
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. businessman decapitated for the camera by militant Islamists in Iraq was good-natured, adventurous and all but oblivious to the danger that surrounded him, friends and acquaintances said on Friday.
According to those who knew Nick Berg, whose grisly execution -- apparently at the hands of an al Qaeda leader -- was shown on an Islamist website, the adventurous spirit that led him to seek a living repairing communications equipment in postwar Iraq may also have blinded him to its peril.
"He was a risk taker by nature," said Andy Duke, a consultant who lived across from Berg in a budget Baghdad hotel favoured by foreign journalists and independent contractors.
"His job was to climb up those towers in the wind and rain to keep the telecommunications system going," said Duke, gesturing from the window of his room to radio antennas jutting from the room of an adjacent hotel on the banks of the Tigris.
"It was inherently dangerous, but that's what he did."
Berg went missing on April 10 after leaving the Fanar hotel, to which he had returned after about three weeks of detention in northern Iraqi city of Mosul that are the subject of irreconcilable claims by U.S. officials and family members who blame the military for his abduction and death.
The U.S.-led occupation authority says the FBI visited Berg three times after he was arrested by Iraqi police on March 24, but that he was never in U.S. custody. The chief of the Mosul police -- subordinate to the U.S. military, like all Iraqi security forces -- denies ever detaining Berg.
Berg's father flatly rejected claims his son had not been in U.S. custody. "I have a written statement from the State Department in Baghdad ... saying that my son was being held by the military," said Michael Berg in a radio interview.
"IT WAS AN ADVENTURE"
While the circumstances of Berg's detention remain obscure, his friends recall the episode and his account of it as an incident which showed Berg's ability to brush up against danger and emerge unfazed, until his death.
"He was not even pissed off," said a foreign reporter who ran into Berg upon his return from Baghdad after being released. "He said it was an adventure. He was like, this sort of thing happens."
"He told me, 'You wanna hear something funny? I got arrested in Mosul when the police asked me for I.D. I showed them my U.S. passport with the Jewish name and the Israeli stamp and I guess they figured I was a spy," said the reporter, who asked not to be identified.
The reporter said Berg told him he had been in Iraqi police custody only briefly, spending most of his detention with the U.S. military and representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the occupation's civilian administration.
CPA and military officials declined to comment immediately on that claim.
Berg's friends said his arrest seemed not to dent an optimism about his venture in Iraq that bordered on a dangerous naivety.
"I was worried for him. He was too white, he would walk around the streets in a sleeveless T-shirt, ripped jeans," said his journalist friend. "He looked military."
Duke, who saw Berg on April 9, the eve of his disappearance, said that though he was planning to return to the United States his optimism about his prospects in Iraq was undimmed.
"He came over and we had a few beers and talked about his future, how this was going to be an opportunity for a guy in the tower business."
|
|
