Family of Executed American Angry with U.S. Govt.

Meanwhile, the body of Nick Berg, a communications tower businessman, arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, funeral director Carl Goldstein told reporters outside the family's suburban home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.

Neighbor Bruce Hauser, who has acted as a family spokesman, said, "The community feels that if the government had Nick Berg in their control they should have sought to release Berg back to his home country."

"I have to believe that the American government had him in their custody. The Bergs knew that Nick was in their custody and the Bergs wanted the government to release him so he could come home," Hauser said.

On April 5, nearly two weeks after Berg disappeared in Iraq, the family sued in federal court in Philadelphia and named Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as responsible for their son's disappearance.

Berg was missing from March 24 until his release on April 6, when he told his parents he had been detained by Iraqi police in Mosul. He disappeared again on April 9 after telling his parents he was looking for a safe way out.

Dan Senor, spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, said on Wednesday that Berg had not been in U.S. custody before or after his arrest. But U.S. authorities in Iraq are nominally in charge of Iraqi police and the military.

VISITED BY FBI

Senor said Berg was visited three times by the FBI for possibly suspicious activities but determined he was "not involved in any criminal or terrorist activities."

A Web site video on Tuesday showed a masked man cutting off the head of Berg and said al Qaeda's leader in Iraq had personally carried out the killing in revenge for abuses against Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison.

Seven soldiers face charges in the prison scandal that exploded around the world two weeks ago with the publication of graphic pictures of mistreatment.

The video is similar to the one made in 2002 of the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Islamic militants in Pakistan. Pearl was forced to say before his killing that he and his parents were Jewish.
Berg, who was also Jewish, did not make any statement about his religion. He named his parents Michael and Suzanne and siblings David and Sara and said he was from Philadelphia.

The funeral director Goldstein said a memorial service had been tentatively scheduled for Friday at a West Chester synagogue.

Berg went missing on April 9 around the time dozens of foreigners were seized by guerrillas after U.S. Marines began a crackdown in the city of Falluja.

"I still hold him (Rumsfeld) responsible because if they had let him go after a reasonable time or given access to a lawyer we could have gotten him out of there before the hostilities escalated," Michael Berg told WBUR public radio station on Tuesday.

In the suburb where Berg grew up, he was remembered as a stocky, intelligent man with a crew cut who had worked in Africa before going to U.S.-occupied Iraq with the idealistic mission to help with reconstruction.

The execution unleashed impassioned reactions from sympathy for his family to a desire for revenge to anger at the Bush administration, to attacks on both Muslims and Jews.

A sampling of hundreds of e-mails reacting to Tuesday's beheading displayed a nationalistic impulse for quick revenge and a growing resentment of Muslims living in the United States.

Others directed their anger at the Bush administration, blaming the killing on the invasion of Iraq that has fueled the fury of Muslim fundamentalists against the United States.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=5123275