An Iraqi taxi driver has testified that he saw a car carrying three Asian people surrounded by gunmen around noon Wednesday near Fallujah in southern Iraq.
The taxi driver identified one of the passengers as Soichiro Koriyama, one of the three Japanese taken hostage by a group threatening to kill them unless Japan withdraws its troops from Iraq, while looking through photos of the abductees.
The driver said he and his colleague in another taxi were on their way back to Jordan from Baghdad when they saw the car on a road between Fallujah and Ramadi, roughly 100 km west of Baghdad.
He said there were two men and a woman inside the orange car, and three masked men armed with automatic rifles were standing in front of the vehicle.