Free the Captives: Witness Against Illegal Detention and Torture

Christian Peacemaker captive Jim Loney spoke today as he arrived home after 118 days of captivity in Iraq:

My friend and fellow Canadian in captivity, Harmeet Sooden, showed me something yesterday. Our captors gave us notebooks, and Harmeet opened his notebook to show me two fractions --3/4 and 4/4--that Tom had written. "It was the only thing he wrote in my book," he said. Tom, who had been a professional musician, wrote them as part of a lesson in music theory he
gave Harmeet --3/4 time, 4/4 time. Harmeet put his finger over the 3/4 and said, "In the beginning we were 4/4." Then he put his finger over the 4/4 and said, "Now we're this --3/4." We are only 3/4. Tom is not coming home with us. I am so sorry, Kassie and Andrew.

The UK Observer's report includes further details about Tom's role as a caregiver in captivity:

In the darkest moments of their kidnap ordeal, it was American Tom Fox, who had proved the strongest, consoling his other CPT hostages. It was Fox, who had spent two years in Baghdad and spoke some Arabic, who led the group when 'they were numb and down', said his friends at the city's Christian Peacemaker office. Ultimately his role as 'leader' of the group may have led to his death. Five weeks ago, the 54-year-old from Virginia was taken from the group and later found shot dead in Baghdad.

As Jim Loney sat recovering in the Green Zone last Friday, he recalled the moment when he was bundled at gunpoint into the kidnappers' car. It was a memory of the concern that showed on the face of his on his translator as they were led away, said Anita David, a member of the CPT team in Baghdad. And it was a memory that has been superseded in the past two days only by the knowledge that Fox was dead.

'He had been caretaking them. They were emotionally done in. He was the one who was supporting the rest,' said Anita David on Friday evening after visiting the men for a second time. News of his death, however, was confirmation of an awful intimation. Although they had been deprived of any access to news of what was going on in the outside world, at some stage in the last weeks of their captivity the men had briefly seen a television image of Fox's face and feared the worst.

Earlier in his statement, Loney talked about the the people who united to work for their release (emphasis added):

A great hand of solidarity reached out for us, a hand that included the hands of Palestinian children holding pictures of us, and the hands of the British soldier who cut our chains with a bolt cutter. That great hand was able to deliver three of us from the shadow of death. I am grateful in a way that can never be adequately expressed in words.

There are so many people that need this hand of solidarity, right now, today, and I'm thinking specifically of prisoners held all over the world, people who have disappeared into an abyss of detention without charge, due process, hope of release-- some victims of physical and psychological torture--people unknown and forgotten. It is my deepest wish that every forsaken human being should have a hand of solidarity reaching out to them.

May we be faithful the this great hand of solidarity, the servant church revealed by Tom's sacrifice.