Looking pale and tired, a kidnapped US reporter, Jill Carroll, appeared in a silent videotape broadcast on Tuesday by al-Jazeera television. The network said her captors had threatened to kill her if the US does not release all women held prisoner in Iraq within 72 hours.
The tape showed Carroll, 28, speaking against a white background, her long dark hair parted in the center, but there was no sound. Al-Jazeera said she had asked the kidnappers to have pity and release her.
No insurgent group has taken responsibility for kidnapping her on Jan. 7, but a still photograph from the videotape on the network's Web site showed the words "The Revenge Brigade." The group is not known to have taken hostages in the past.
Carroll, a freelance reporter who was working primarily for The Christian Science Monitor, was abducted in a dangerous part of western Baghdad. She had just left the office of Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab political leader, when gunmen intercepted her car, aiming pistols at the driver and pulling him out.
In a statement on the Monitor's Web site, her family wrote: "Jill is an innocent journalist, and we respectfully ask that you please show her mercy and allow her to return home to her mother, sister and family. Jill is a kind person whose love for Iraq and the Iraqi people are evident in her articles."
The editor of the Monitor, Richard Bergenheim, also posted an appeal for her release.
Carroll, who grew up in Michigan and speaks some Arabic, had been reporting in the Middle East since late 2002, mostly in Iraq.
More than 400 foreigners and at least 36 journalists have been kidnapped in Iraq since 2003, along with thousands of Iraqis. Most foreigners have been released, but dozens have been killed. A number of Westerners remain captive, including four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who were kidnapped in December. Only one Western woman is believed to have been killed by her captors: Margaret Hassan, an Irish-born aid worker who had lived in Iraq for years and was kidnapped in late 2004 in the same neighborhood as Carroll.
The US military raided a hard-line Sunni mosque in Baghdad a day after Carroll was kidnapped, setting off angry demonstrations by hundreds of Iraqis. Military officials later said the raid was based on a tip from an Iraqi and was a necessary response to the kidnapping.
Insurgent attacks across Iraq on Tuesday killed at least nine people.
In Baghdad, gunmen disguised as police burst into the offices of a contractor that supplies the Iraqi army with food and shot seven workers to death, Iraqi officials said. The gunmen arrived in two sedans at Nawrooz, a Kurdish-owned caterer, at 9pm in the bustling Karrada neighborhood, Interior Ministry officials said. Using pistols with silencers, they opened fire on 11 workers still in the building, killing seven.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS