Grisly news gives families hope

Grisly news gives families hope

Not included with the other fingers was one from a kidnapped Missouri man.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The image turns Patrick Reuben’s stomach: someone cutting off his twin brother’s finger and putting it in a package with other severed digits.

Yet the grim news this week that captors had sent the fingers to U.S. officials has renewed a sense of hope for relatives of Paul Reuben and four other security workers who were kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago.

“It shows that they’ve been alive recently,” Reuben said Thursday.

The families of the missing workers have gotten little new information in the case, causing frustration and doubt that they will see their loved ones again. That seemed to change with reports that the fingers sent to the U.S. government matched the missing contractors’ DNA.

The FBI and the State Department declined to comment on the matter Thursday. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said only that officials “continue to demand these hostages’ immediate release so that they can be returned safely to their families.”

A U.S. government official in Washington said the fingers belonged to men abducted in two separate incidents that occurred a month and a half apart. The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about the matter.

Four of the men — Paul Reuben, of Minneapolis; Jonathon Cote, of Getzville, N.Y.; Joshua Munns, of Redding, Calif.; and Bert Nussbaumer, of Vienna, Austria — were guards for Crescent Security Group when men in Iraqi police uniforms ambushed their convoy near the Kuwaiti border Nov. 16, 2006. The fifth, Ronald J. Withrow, of Lubbock, Texas, was a contractor working for JPI Worldwide when he was abducted Jan. 5, 2007, near Basra.

John Young of Lee’s Summit, Mo., was abducted with Reuben, Cote, Munns and Nussbaumer, but none of Young’s fingers was sent to the U.S. military, the Washington official said.

Young’s mother, Sharon DeBrabander, said she’s still hopeful her son will come home. She’s tried to get information without much success, she said.

“I spend 10 hours a day, seven days a week on the phone to find answers. Everyone’s life is turned upside down, but our kids’ lives are much worse,” she said.