U.S. Businessman Beheaded in Iraq as Militants’ Videotape Rolls

WASHINGTON —  An American businessmen who had been missing in Iraq since last month was beheaded by five masked Islamic militants, who posted a video of the killing on the Internet on Tuesday and called it revenge for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison.

In the grainy video on a website that said the kidnappers were affiliated with Al Qaeda, Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old communications contractor from Pennsylvania, is seen bound and seated in a plastic chair. After his captors read a brief statement, Berg screams as he is attacked with a large knife.

A State Department official confirmed Tuesday that the victim was Berg, who was reported missing in Iraq by his family on April 9 and whose body was found Saturday in Baghdad by a U.S. military patrol.

The CIA is examining the video for clues to who carried out the kidnapping and killing of the independent businessman, a U.S. intelligence official said. The official said the video surfaced on a website that “has in the past run Al Qaeda statements and announcements and statements from other Islamic groups.” The website is run by the group Muntada al Ansar.

Berg’s killing was apparently the first whose perpetrators claimed was in retaliation for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Its announcement came as the Senate held more hearings Tuesday on the scandal that erupted last month after CBS broadcast photographs of military prison guards humiliating and abusing Iraqi inmates. President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have apologized for the abuses, which they described as aberrant behavior on the part of a few American soldiers.

Many foreigners in Iraq had been dreading fallout from the prison scandal. A spate of kidnappings of Westerners last month had already left contract workers, journalists and other foreigners on edge. Since the U.S.-led invasion last year, about 50 foreign civilians have disappeared in Iraq. Some have been freed, others have been killed, and several are believed to still be held by militants.

The video first shows the bearded Berg making a brief statement.

“My name is Nick Berg, my father’s name is Michael, my mother’s name is Suzanne,” Berg says. “I have a brother and a sister, David and Sara. I live in West Chester, near Philadelphia.”

Berg is then seen seated on the floor, still bound, with five men dressed in black standing behind him. Some are armed. All of their faces are hidden by scarves or ski masks.

One of the masked men reads a prepared statement exhorting Muslims to do something about the humiliation inflicted on prisoners by U.S. forces.

“Nation of Islam, is there any excuse left to sit idly by? And how can free Muslims sleep soundly as they see Islam being slaughtered, honor bleeding, photographs of shame and reports of satanic degradation of the people of Islam, men and women, in Abu Ghraib prison?” the man asks.

“For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused. So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way.”

The man also calls Bush a “dog of the West,” warning him that “your worst days are coming, with the help of God. You and your soldiers will regret the day when your feet touched the land of Iraq.”

The man shouts, “Allahu akbar!” -- “God is great!” -- and pulls a large knife from under his shirt. Berg screams as the man bends him to the side and saws his head off with the knife. The men then hold Berg’s bearded, bleeding head up for the camera.

The video was titled, “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American,” a reference to the Palestinian-Jordanian militant thought to be closely linked with Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. The U.S. intelligence official said there was no evidence to corroborate Zarqawi’s association with the killing.

“It isn’t clear at this point, given that they all had masks on, whether [Zarqawi] is shown in the video or whether it was done at his behest,” the official said. “Certainly those are issues being looked at. We know he is very much involved in anti-coalition activities and believed responsible for some of the attacks we’ve seen.”

The United States has offered a $10-million reward for information leading to Zarqawi’s capture or death.

Berg apparently was one of a handful of independent businessmen who had traveled to Iraq to seek work in the reconstruction. Most contractors operating in the country are connected to companies that provide them with security.

“He just really wanted to be part of something important,” his father, Michael Berg, said in a television interview over the weekend. “He supported the administration being in Iraq. He supported everything they were doing.”

Berg long had an interest in electronics. In high school, he was on the Science Olympiad team, which won national awards. At one competition, a friend said, he was able to patch into the school’s public-address system and blast music throughout the auditorium, delighting the other contestants.

During college Berg traveled to Uganda, where he was involved in science projects, friends said.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer published Saturday, Michael and Suzanne Berg said their son, who worked on communications towers and owned a business called Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc., had been about to return home from working in Iraq as an independent civilian contractor when they lost contact with him.

They said their son first went to Iraq on Dec. 21, staying until Feb. 1. Berg returned to Iraq on March 14, looking for work, and planned to return to Pennsylvania on March 30.

The Bergs later learned their son apparently was arrested March 24 at a checkpoint in Mosul, in northern Iraq. FBI agents visited their home to question them about him on March 31.

An FBI spokeswoman in Philadelphia, Jerri Williams, acknowledged in a telephone interview with The Times on Tuesday that FBI agents had interviewed Berg’s parents at their home in West Chester that day, but she declined to elaborate.

Furious that their son might be in U.S. custody in Iraq, the Bergs sought to obtain his release, they have said in interviews with Philadelphia news organizations. On April 5, they filed a lawsuit against the government, claiming that he was being detained by the U.S. military. He was released the next day and called home.

The Bergs said that they last heard from their son April 9 -- the day seven U.S. contractors and two soldiers disappeared when their supply convoy disappeared near Baghdad.

One of that group of hostages, Thomas Hamill, escaped his captors this month and is now home in Mississippi. Four other workers and one of the soldiers have been confirmed dead. Two civilians and one soldier are still missing.

The Bergs could not be reached Tuesday for comment. In an interview with Associated Press, Michael Berg criticized the U.S. military, blaming it for preventing his son’s departure as planned March 30.

The White House condemned the execution, as did Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“This shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in response to questions from reporters traveling with Bush to Arkansas.

In a statement, Kerry said he was “horrified and deeply saddened by the senseless murder of Nicholas Berg.”

Gabriel Weimann, a specialist in communications and terrorism with the United States Institute of Peace, said that the video was shockingly coldblooded, even by the standards of websites run by Islamic militants that he has studied for seven years.

The killing, Weimann noted, appeared similar to the 2002 videotaped execution of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic militants in Pakistan. Pearl, too, was allowed to make a statement and then had his throat cut on camera, and the video was later posted on Islamic websites.

Islamic militants use their websites for many purposes, Weimann said, including fundraising and recruiting. But this video, he said, “is psychological warfare. It is sending a scary message, trying to use the word terror in its simplest meaning -- to spread terror, to scare other people.”

Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in Baghdad, Richard B. Schmitt in Washington, John J. Goldman in Pennsylvania, Matea Gold in Jacksonville, Fla., and Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this report.