WASHINGTON — Relatives, friends and a nationwide network of Christian peace advocates reacted with anguish and shock Saturday to the death of Tom Fox, a Quaker whose belief in nonviolence led him to Iraq, where he was kidnapped, tortured and killed.
Iraqi police said the body of Fox, 54, clad in a gray warmup suit, was found Thursday with his hands and feet tied and gunshot wounds to his head and chest. There were cuts on his body and bruises on his head that police said appeared to have been inflicted by electrical cables.
Children in Baghdad's upscale Mansour neighborhood found the body, wrapped in a blanket and black plastic bags, beside a railway line on a lot used as a garbage dump. Fox's body is on its way back to the United States, according to the U.S. Embassy.
Fox, of Clear Brook, Va., was abducted in November along with three other members of Christian Peacemaker Teams, a group of North American religious activists who travel to conflict zones to work with civilians and make appeals for peace to combatants. A previously unknown group, the Swords of Righteousness Brigade, claimed responsibility for the abductions.
"We mourn the loss of Tom Fox, who combined a lightness of spirit, a firm opposition to all oppression, and the recognition of God in everyone," Christian Peacemakers said in a statement posted on its website. "We renew our plea for the safe release of Harmeet Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember."
Sooden and Loney are Canadians. Kember is British.
Christian peace advocates who admired and worked with Fox gathered in northern Virginia and in Baghdad on Saturday to grieve and recall a quiet man whose belief in nonviolence led him to leave a managerial job in Virginia to work for a subsistence wage in Iraq. Colleagues in Chicago held a candlelight vigil Saturday night.
Friends said Fox had opposed the Vietnam War and had long harbored a Christian-inspired belief in nonviolence, even as he worked for years as a musician and a store manager. But the Sept. 11 attacks and the resulting global strife marked a galvanizing moment that led him out of the life he had known in northern Virginia.
"Tom left his life as we know it with a clear sense that after 9/11, he felt like he needed to do something very concrete to help create peace in the world," said Marge Epstein, a friend and a member of his Quaker congregation in Virginia.
