The video was broadcast on the Arab television station Al-Jazeera after a top aide to firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said the kidnappers had told him they would free Micah Garen on Friday, but there was no word on his release.

"I am an American journalist in Iraq and I've been asked to deliver a message," the man, identified as Garen, a New York-based journalist, said on the video. "I am in captivity and being treated well."

The newsreader said that Garen also had called for an end to the killing in Najaf, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have been fighting a radical Shiite militia for two weeks, though that part of the audio was inaudible.

According to witnesses, Garen and his Iraqi translator, Amir Doushi, were walking through a market in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Aug. 13 when two armed men in civilian clothes seized them, police said. There was no word on Doushi's fate.

Al-Jazeera reported Thursday that a militant group calling itself the Martyrs Brigade had abducted Garen and would kill him within 48 hours unless U.S. troops pull out of the holy city of Najaf.

Sheik Aws al-Khafaji, a top al-Sadr aide who had appealed for Garen's release, said he had spoken to the kidnappers, who said they would let the journalist go later Friday. "The kidnappers have put the journalist in a safe place," al-Khafaji said from Nasiriyah.

Garen's stepfather, Giovanni Fazio, of Newton, Mass., however, said the family had not received any notification. "All we know is what we've seen on television," Fazio said.

Scores of foreigners have been kidnapped in recent months by insurgents and criminal gangs seeking to extort ransom or with the political motive of trying to force foreign troops and companies to leave the country.

The Italian Foreign Ministry also said Friday that Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni has gone missing in Iraq. Baldoni, a freelance journalist who went to Iraq for the news magazine Diario, was believed to have been in Najaf, the ministry said.

The magazine's editor in chief, Enrico Deaglio, told the ANSA news agency that he last had contact with Baldoni via e-mail two days ago. He said Baldoni was on his first trip to Iraq.

The family of Turkish hostage Aytullah Gezmen, meanwhile, was anxiously praying for his release Friday, a day after two Turkish companies withdrew from Iraq in a bid to save his life.

A Turkish television channel on Thursday broadcast a video of Gezmen and said the kidnappers threatened to kill him if the companies didn't leave Iraq within three days.

"We're so worried. We don't understand why they did not release him yet," Sevim Gezmen, a sister-in-law, said by telephone Friday from the family's home in southern Turkish city of Iskenderun. "Time is running out and we have no means to make sure that they have heard that the companies have withdrawn from Iraq."

Also, the Iraqi militant group Ansar al-Sunna Army claimed in a statement posted on its Web site to have kidnapped 12 Nepalese workers subcontracted to a Jordanian company and working for the U.S. militaty in Iraq early Friday.

The group has been linked to unfounded claims of kidnappings in the past and there was no way to verify the authenticity of the latest report.

Jordanian and Nepalese officials that were contacted by The Associated Press on Friday said they had no details on the abduction of any Nepalese workers.

Garen was working on a story about the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq when he was abducted, said his fiancee, Marie-Helene Carleton.

British journalist James Brandon was kidnapped and similarly threatened with death last week, but freed the next day after a public appeal by al-Sadr's aides, including al-Khafaji.

Thousands of U.S. troops are deployed in Najaf, whose revered Imam Ali Shrine is the holiest in Iraq for Shiite Muslims. U.S. officials have repeatedly said that they would not give into the demands of kidnappers, and any U.S. withdrawal from the city was highly unlikely.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Thursday that the United States was doing everything possible to find Garen.

Garen worked for Four Corners media, identified on its Web site as a "documentary organization working in still photography, video and print media."

He has taken photographs as a stringer for The Associated Press and had a story published in The New York Times. His photographs also have appeared in U.S. News & World Report.

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