United States journalist Jill Carroll has been released almost 12 weeks after being abducted at gunpoint on a Baghdad street, Sunni politician Tariq al-Hashimi told Agence France-Presse on Thursday.
”She is free and is with me right now,” Hashimi said, but did not give further details.
The journalist, who was freelancing for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, was seized on January 7 in the Iraqi capital by armed men who shot dead her interpreter.
Her release came a week after US and British forces rescued three oither Western hostages who had been held captive in Iraq for almost four months and followed an appeal by her twin sister Katie on Wednesday.
Hashimi said Carroll (28) did not wanted her pictures to be taken by the media.
Carroll had appeared in three videos broadcast on Arab television since she was seized while she was on her way to meet Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi at his office in Baghdad.
Carroll’s captors set numerous deadlines threatening to kill her if US-led forces failed to release all female detainees in Iraq.
”It has been nearly two months since the last video of my sister was broadcast. We have had no contact with her nor received any information about her condition,” Katie Carroll had said in her appeal on Dubai-based al-Arabiya television.
”I’ve been living a nightmare, worrying if she is hurt or ill. There is no one I hold closer to my heart than my sister and I am deeply worried wondering how she is being treated. No family should have to endure having their loved one taken away from them in this way,” she said.
She said her sister, who lived in Iraq for three years, ”has many Iraqi friends, and respects their culture. My sister has always had special praise for the strength and resilience of Iraqi women and mothers.
”I also hope that those with Jill have come to know her — that they recognise what a wonderful person she is and realize that they can show the world that they are merciful to an innocent woman by returning her safely home to us,” she said.
Last Thursday, the three aid workers from the Christian Peacemaker Teams — Canadians Harmeet Sooden (32) and Jim Loney (41) and Briton Norman Kember, (74) — were found together in a house in western Baghdad. They were bound, but the house was otherwise empty and not a shot was fired.
Their US colleague Tom Fox, seized with them in Baghdad on November 26, was slain three weeks ago and his body found dumped in the city.
At least 430 foreigners are known to have been taken hostage in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion, a US diplomat said in Baghdad earlier this month.
They include around 40 US nationals, some of them Iraqi-Americans. – AFP
