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Reporter Carroll freed in Baghdad

American reporter Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped three months ago in a bloody ambush that killed her translator and later appeared in videotapes pleading for help, was released yesterday. Her editor said she was "fine."

"She was released this morning, she's talked to her father and she's fine," said David Cook, an editor for the Christian Science Monitor in Washington.

Police Lieutenant Colonel Falah al-Mohammedawi said Carroll was released near an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party in western Baghdad.

"She is healthy and we handed her over to the Americans," said Nasir al-Ani, a party member.

The party is the main Sunni political organization.

Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Monitor, was kidnapped on Jan. 7, in Baghdad's western Adil neighborhood while going to interview Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi. Her translator was killed in the attack about 300m from al-Dulaimi's office.

Her captors, calling themselves the Revenge Brigades, had demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26 and said Carroll would be killed if that didn't happen. The date came and went with no word about her.

She was last seen in a videotape broadcast Feb. 9 by the private Kuwaiti TV station Al-Rai.

On Wednesday Carroll's twin, Katie, pleaded for her sister's release on the Al-Arabiya network.

"I've been living a nightmare, worrying if she is hurt or ill," she said in a statement.

Meanwhile, assailants in speeding cars gunned down a police commando as he was leaving his house in south Baghdad yesterday, and drive-by shooters killed a lawyer as she got out of a taxi in the southern city of Basra, police said. A dozen Iraqis were wounded in bombings and other attacks in the capital. The US military also reported two deaths yesterday.

In other developments, Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari on Wednesday vigorously asserted his right to stay in office and warned the US against interfering in the country's political process.

Al-Jaafari also defended his recent political alliance with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, now the prime minister's most powerful backer, saying in an interview that al-Sadr and his militia, now thousands strong, are a fact of life in Iraq and need to be accepted into mainstream politics.

Al-Jaafari said he would work to fold the country's myriad militias into the official security forces and ensure that recruits and top security ministers abandoned their ethnic or sectarian loyalties.

Al-Jaafari is at the center of the deadlock in the talks over forming a new government.

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New kind of violence now terrorizing Iraqis

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