Hostage negotiations deadlocked: Japan

Tokyo, January 31

Japan’ deputy foreign minister has said negotiations with the Islamic State group threatening to execute a Jordanian pilot and a Japanese journalist have become “deadlocked,” local media reported today.

Yasuhide Nakayama, who is leading Tokyo’s emergency response team in Amman, told reporters in the Jordanian capital late yesterday that there had been no progress in trying to secure the release of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto and airman Maaz al-Kassasbeh.

“It has become deadlocked,” he said, according to Japan’s public broadcaster NHK. “Staying vigilant, we will continue analysing and examining information as the government is making concerted efforts together.”

In Tokyo, deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshige Seko, a key aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said this morning that the government was still waiting for new information on the hostage crisis.

IS had vowed to kill Kassasbeh by sunset on Thursday unless Amman hands over an Iraqi female jihadist in return for Goto.

Jordan has demanded evidence that the pilot, who crashed in Syria on December 24, is still alive before freeing would-be suicide bomber Sajida al-Rishawi, who is on death row.

Jordan has offered to free Rishawi, who was convicted for her part in triple-hotel bombings in Amman in 2005 that killed 60 people, if IS releases the pilot. — AFP