Reporters Held Hostage in Iraq Tell of Captivity

By: (AP) Canadian Scott Taylor tells of being chained hand and foot, waiting to be killed. Zeynep Tugrul of Turkey still jumps at a sharp sound--every metallic click, she says, sounds like a gun.

In separate interviews with The Associated Press, the two journalists described four days together in captivity in Iraq--a time they said they were beaten and threatened with death.

No group has claimed responsibility for kidnapping Taylor or Tugrul and no demands were issued. No picture or video footage was distributed by men the journalists said held them captive.

A Turkish official said the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad helped secure their release and believed their accounts. But Reynald Doiron of Canada's Foreign Affairs department said, "We won't comment, deny, endorse, do anything due to that no Canadian official was witness to the events he said he went through in northern Iraq."

Taylor, 43, is the publisher of Esprit de Corps, a military magazine based in Ottawa, and a columnist for the Chronicle Herald newspaper. Tugrul, 28, is a diplomatic correspondent with the daily Sabah newspaper.

Tugrul and Taylor said their ordeal began Sept. 7 when they reached Tal Afar, an ethnic Turkish city in northern Iraq, just before the U.S. military launched an offensive against foreign insurgents there.

The journalists said Iraqi police turned them over to masked men, and they got into a car, thinking they were being taken to see a local official.

"It was not hostile, we were directed by police to get into the car," Taylor said by telephone from Ottawa last week. "I thought that they were special units. ... At no time did I suspect there was anything foul or that we were being taken until it was too late."

They said they realized to their horror that they were in the hands of insurgents when masked men began shouting "spies!" at them and pushed them into a room in a farm house. Their hands were later bound and they were blindfolded, they said.

"There have been lots of spies around and we have beheaded several of them," Tugrul quotes her captors as saying.

Taylor said his captors at one point announced they would kill him the next morning. "There was no way to escape," Taylor recalled, "I really, really lost all hope."

The journalists said they were occasionally blindfolded and interrogated but mostly they were free to walk around the houses where they were kept. Armed men, some as young as 15 years old, watched them constantly, they said.

Their captors at first did not believe Taylor and Tugrul were journalists, and searched the Internet for confirmation, Tugrul said.

When U.S. warplanes started bombing Tal Afar, she said, the captors began hauling rocket-propelled grenades from the back of an old truck to the outside of the house.

"One of them told me, 'Don't be scared and just shout Allahu Akbar (God is great),' and I found myself shouting Allahu Akbar," Tugrul said.

Their captors' leader was killed fighting U.S. forces, the journalists said.

"He had been convinced that we were journalists and had promised to free us the next day," Tugrul said. "Our hopes of surviving began fading away afterward."

The journalists said they were taken from house to house in Tal Afar and in the nearby city of Mosul and even spent a night in the desert, sleeping beside their armed captors.

Taylor said he thought he and Tugrul were going to die several times.

Tugrul is still terrified. Last week, she jumped in her seat when she heard a metallic clicking made by a nearby cleaning man.

"What is that?" she said as she jumped and looked around. "I can't stop it. I thought it was a gun, I am still trembling."

Tugrul said she prayed daily in a bid to prove she was a pious Muslim. She had dressed conservatively in a long loose coat and an Islamic-style head scarf, but her kidnappers criticized her for wearing pants, she said.

Tugrul said she was beaten the night she was released.

"Your friend has confessed everything, are you ready to confess?" one man shouted as he hit Tugrul with a belt, she said. There were no visible marks on her arms 13 days after she was freed.

"I yelled him back, saying, we came here for you, to get your story, I've nothing to say to people like you," Tugrul said.

She said she was freed without explanation Sept. 11. A day later, Taylor said he was released, again with no explanation.