Latest Details on Release of Kidnapped Reporter

By: E&P Staff Fresh details about reporter Jill Carroll's captivity, and release, continued to emerge late Thursday and early Friday.

In a front-page story for The Washington Post's Friday edition, Baghdad correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer quotes Carroll, who is close to several Post employees in Iraq, saying, "It was like falling off a cliff for three months, waiting to hit the ground."

Knickmeyer observes: "Three months without exercise had made her face round. Her captors had treated her well, she said, and she never dared turn down their offers of meals or candy for fear of giving offense. I'm fat, she said.

"She asked for news of the world. She was shocked to hear of the prayers on her behalf, of the media coverage, of the vigils and balloon releases at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.

"Kidnapped Jan. 7, three weeks after Iraq's national elections, she was shocked as well to hear that Iraq had still not formed a new government."

One of Carroll's hardest days, ironically, had been Wednesday, the day before her release, when she broke down and cried hard, she told the Post.

The New York Times notes on Friday, "Dozens of people are kidnapped on Baghdad's streets every day ? most of them for ransom ? and they are often sold while in captivity from one group to another. Though she made no mention of being traded from one group to another, it was unclear on Thursday whether Ms. Carroll had been released by the same men who had captured her.

"The motives of the group were unknown as well; some officials speculated that the kidnappers had originally grabbed Ms. Carroll in the hope of securing a ransom and began to demand the release of the Iraqi women after it seemed less probable to them that they would get money."

Paul Taggart, who was taken hostage in Iraq for three days in 2004, had this to say to Carroll in an interview with the Detroit Free Press: "I have one word of warning for her, the media is just relentless...Being the subject definitely takes a toll."

An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor, Carroll's home newspaper for much of the past year, on Friday hailed the efforts to free or support Carroll by a wide variety of people, from its own staffers to strangers around the world. It concludes on this note:

"And in a region which seems to drink in violence like mother's milk, it took courage for Muslim clerics to go against the grain of radical Islamist thinking and publicly and consistently denounce hostage taking and killing as a means to an end. Where does this courage come from? It can only result from a faith in freedom's enduring value as a God-given right, an ever-present condition that liberates individuals and societies, allowing them to walk on the path toward limitless possibilities. This is what makes hope more than just an empty gesture.

"The wonderful thing about freedom is that the more people experience it, the more committed they become to it. And that is why hope for other hostages in Iraq and elsewhere is not in vain."