Mar 30 2006
Journalist Jill Carroll Freed
The Washington Post : reprint
American journalist Jill Carroll, abducted in early January by gunmen in Baghdad, was released to a Sunni Arab political party in the capital Thursday morning after 82 days in captivity.
Carroll, 28, a freelance reporter working for the Christian Science Monitor, was said to be unharmed. She arrived safely at the party headquarters just after 1 p.m.
“She was released this morning; she’s talked to her father and she’s fine,” David Cook, an editor for the Monitor, told the Associated Press.
“Unknown people,” released Carroll to the Iraqi Islamic Party’s branch office in Amariyah in the western part of the city, Tariq al-Hashimi, the party’s secretary general, said in a telephone conversation at 12:30 p.m. local time. The party then transported her by armed convoy to its headquarters in the Yarmouk district.
“She is OK. She is safe. She is more or less scared,” Hashimi said. “I told her calm down and we would take care of her.”
Carroll was kidnapped Jan. 7, after arriving for an interview with Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Adil. When she left his office after Dulaimi did not show up, her car was attacked by gunmen who took her hostage. Her translator, Allan Anwiya, 29, was killed in the ambush, while her driver escaped.
In a video aired Jan. 17 on the Al-Jazeera satellite network, Carroll’s captors threatened to kill her in 72 hours unless all female prisoners in American detention facilities in Iraq were released. She was shown crying and clad in a black headscarf in a second video aired without sound on Jan. 30 by a group calling itself the Vengeance Brigade.
Carroll was last seen in a Feb. 9 video broadcast on Kuwaiti television station Al-Rai. In a calm voice she asked her supporters to do whatever was necessary to gain her release and her captors gave a Feb. 26 deadline for their demands to be met.
Carroll’s release followed a comprehensive media campaign by family members, religious and political leaders in Iraq and around the world and the Boston-based Monitor. Her parents made regular appearances on English and Arabic-language television programs and her twin sister Katie said on television Wednesday night, “We would be grateful for any new sign that Jill is well.”
Kidnappings of Westerners in Iraq has grown more common in recent months. One week ago, British and U.S. soldiers freed three members of the Chicago-based advocacy group Christian Peacemaker Teams who had been abducted in late November. A fourth member of the group who was kidnapped then, Tom Fox, of Clear Brook, Va., was shot dead and dumped on a Baghdad street in early March.
