The Syrian Embassy in Ukraine has said that the Syrian, Ukrainian and Russian authorities are cooperating to ensure the speedy release of Ukrainian journalist Anhar Kochneva, who was abducted by rebels in Syria.
“Our authorities, including our embassy, in cooperation with Ukrainian and Russian authorities, are doing all they can to release her,” the embassy told Interfax-Ukraine regarding the situation with the abducted Ukrainian.
According to the embassy, Kochneva is “significant prey” for the group that abducted her, as in this way they prevented her from objectively covering the events in the country.
The embassy said that an information war was currently being waged against Syria, during which a number of leading Western and Arab media “pledged to make misleading reports about the events in Syria.”
“The fact is that Syria is the only country in the Middle East that opposes the United States and its satellites on the implementation of the plan for the New Middle East. Accordingly, these countries set the goal of breaking Syria, and they don’t want it to exist as a strong independent country,” the embassy said.
The statement says that the “so-called Free Syrian Army” uses violence and acts of terror against the civilian population.
“The number of terror attacks grows every day, thousands of victims have been killed, both civilians and military personnel, and many people have been abducted, and if a ransom is not paid for them, they are killed (and sometimes they are killed even after the receipt of a ransom), not to mention sabotage against infrastructure. Unfortunately, among those abducted is Anhar Kochneva, who was objectively performing her journalistic duties, exposing the deception of some media involved in disinformation,” the embassy said.
The statement also says that 48 Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped in Syria five months ago, and owing to the joint efforts of the Syrian authorities and a number of other countries able to resolve such a problem, the abducted persons were released a few days ago.
As reported, Kochneva was abducted by gunmen of the Free Syrian Army in Syria in October 2012. The kidnappers of the journalist threatened to kill her if a ransom of $50 million was not paid.
The kidnappers even contacted Ukrainian journalists and expressed their indignation at the inactivity of the Ukrainian authorities in this matter, but Kyiv repeatedly said that it was doing everything to release Kochneva.
