Man on videotape says he's missing U.S. soldier

A videotape showing a uniformed man who identifies himself as a missing U.S. soldier was broadcast Friday on the Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera.

The tape shows six men -- four holding rifles and one with a pistol -- standing behind a man seated on the ground and wearing a U.S. Army uniform, who gives his name as Keith Matthew Maupin.

The man, who does not appear to have shaved in several days, wears a camouflage hat in the video.

"We have taken one of the U.S. soldiers hostage," the narrator said.

"He is in good health and being treated based on the tenets of Islamic law for the treatment of soldiers taken hostage. We will keep him until we trade him for our prisoners in the custody of the U.S. enemy. We want them to know -- and the whole world to know -- that when we took him in, he came out of his tank holding a white flag and he lay face down on the ground, just like other soldiers."

U.S. Central Command spokesman Capt. Bruce Frame said Maupin is one of two U.S. soldiers unaccounted for since last Friday, when their fuel convoy came under attack by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire near Baghdad.

Another tape was dropped off Friday at the U.S. Embassy in Doha, Qatar, and then turned over to Central Command in Doha, where officials were trying to verify its authenticity, Frame said.

Also missing since the attack is Sgt. Elmer Krause, 40, of Greensboro, North Carolina. Both he and Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, were with the Army's 724th Transportation Company out of Bartonsville, Illinois, and are listed as "duty-status whereabouts unknown" by the military.

Seven civilian contractors of the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root are also missing since the fuel convoy attack.

The only one publicly identified as having been kidnapped is Thomas Hamill, a truck driver from Macon, Mississippi.

Hamill was shown on a separate videotape last week in which his captors said they would kill him if the United States did not withdraw its troops from the Sunni-majority city of Fallujah. The deadline to meet demands from his captors has passed.

Family, friends and supporters of Maupin planned to rally in his support Friday night in Batavia.

The rally was scheduled before the videotape was broadcast.

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