Militants in the southern city of Basra on Friday released a British journalist they had kidnapped and threatened to kill after aides to militant Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demanded he be freed.
The journalist, James Brandon, was brought to al-Sadr’s local office and freed. He held an impromptu news conference there and thanked the kidnappers and al-Sadr’s aides for working for his release.
Brandon declined to talk about the circumstances of his release.
Brandon is a freelance journalist working in Iraq for the Sunday Telegraph.
Earlier on Friday, Sunday Telegraph deputy editor Matthew d’Ancona said in a written statement that the newspaper had been greatly concerned by the abduction.
”James Brandon was in Basra filing materials for this Sunday newspaper, among other projects,” he said.
Hotel employees in Basra said earlier on Friday that a man registered as ”working for the Sunday Telegraph” had been abducted from the hotel.
About 20 masked gunmen, some wearing police uniform, stormed into the Al-Diyafa hotel at about 11pm local time and dragged the bleeding man out after shots were fired, said a hotel employee, who wished to remain anonymous.
A video tape had been released showing a hooded militant standing next to a bare-chested Brandon wearing what appeared to be a white bandage on his head.
”We demand the American forces withdraw from Najaf within 24 hours or we will kill this British hostage,” the militant says on the video, according to the BBC website, which also reported that Brandon is 23 years old.
”I’m a journalist, I just write about what is happening in Iraq … I’m James Brandon from the Sunday Telegraph,” he reportedly says to the camera.
According to another British freelance journalist who has lived and worked in the same hotel as him in Baghdad, Brandon has been in Iraq for several months and is well used to the risks.
”He had lived in Iraq for the best part of a year without, as far as I can tell, any mishaps, and had previously lived in Yemen, which is obviously not a particularly safe place for Westerners to live,” Colin Freeman said.
”I think he was fairly well acquainted with the risks of being out there and reporting there and so on,” Freeman said.
He said Brandon, who speaks very good Arabic, has worked for a series of English-language newspapers and has been to Basra on at least two previous occasions without a problem.
”He wasn’t a sort of gung-ho news hack,” said Freeman. ”That wasn’t really the sort of stuff that he used to do.”
”He wasn’t running around after every car bomb and so on,” he said. ”He was probably more interested in trying to write features and that sort of stuff.”
Brandon has been writing for several other British newspapers while in Iraq, including the Scotsman and the Independent.
He has also worked for the financial services group Bloomberg, providing Iraqi exchange-rate information from Baghdad. — Sapa-AFP, Sapa-AP