US hostage Warren Weinstein makes plea to Obama in Al Qaeda video (+video)

“He brings people together. When there’s no compromise between people in a meeting, he brings people to one point,” Ehtesham Ullah Khan, a gemologist who worked with Weinstein, told the Monitor last year. “He wants things to be done practically. He’s not like a paper man who likes reports and keeps [himself buried] in the files.”

There is also some concern over Weinstein’s health in captivity. He suffered from several ailments, reports Agence France-Presse. Prior to his abduction he’d changed his diet and took several medications to deal with his health problems. In his hostage video, he reported that that he had all of the medicine he needed.

Weinstein appears clean and in good health during the three-minute video. He wears traditional Pakistani clothing and sits behind a table with books and food. Throughout the video, he is seen periodically taking bites of food, reports Khaama Press.

Though Weinstein is believed to be held somewhere in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, local police say they have made some progress in his case. In April, agents from the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) arrested two men who were said to be involved with the kidnapping, reports the Daily Bhaskar. One of the men, Hafiz Imran, is said by police to have led the abduction operation in Lahore and the other, Saifur Rehman, is accused of sheltering those involved.

Even before Weinstein’s abduction, Pakistan was considered one of the most dangerous places in the world for aid workers. The most recent report on aid worker safety by Humanitarian Outcomes found that Pakistan had the fourth highest rate of security incidents targeting aid workers, following, in order, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia. Local aid workers are most often the victim of these attacks, but on a per capita basis international aid workers face a greater risk of attack.

Late last month British aid worker Khalil Dale was found beheaded in Pakistan about four months after he was abducted. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of the British national, originally of Yemeni origins, who was working with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Pakistan, reports the Dawn. His abductors say the killed him with ICRC failed to pay his ransom.

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