The Christian Science Monitor newspaper on Monday pleaded for the release of American reporter Jill Carroll, seized in Baghdad by abductors who gunned down her Iraqi translator.
Carroll, 28, was abducted on Saturday, apparently as she made her way to interview a prominent Sunni politician.
"We are urgently seeking information about Ms. Carroll and are pursuing every avenue to secure her release," said Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim.
"The Monitor joins Jill's colleagues -- Iraqi and foreign -- in the Baghdad press in calling for her immediate and safe release," the paper said in a statement which named Carroll for the first time.
The paper quoted unidentified relatives of Carroll as pleading for her release and asking her captors to "consider the work she has done to reveal the truth about the Iraq war."
In a dispatch for the American Journalism Review published last year, Carroll wrote that she moved to Jordan ahead of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 to get a feel for the story.
"All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent," she wrote.
"So when I was laid off from my reporting assistant job at the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, it seemed the right time to try to make it happen," Caroll continued.
"There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that," she wrote.
Officials in Baghdad and the Monitor said Carroll was seized as she was on her way to interview prominent Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi.
Dulaimi however said he had no appointment to meet a Western journalist.
The body of Carroll's interpreter, identified by the Monitor as Allan Enwiyah, 32, was later found in the same western Baghdad neighborhood.
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