WORLD / America

Freed Iraq hostage 'forced' to make propaganda video
(AFP)
Updated: 2006-04-02 10:27

Freed Iraq hostage Jill Carroll says she was "forced" to make a propaganda video praising Iraq's insurgents to gain her release and that during her 12-week ordeal her captors threatened her "many times".

In a statement made shortly after she arrived from Iraq at a US air base in Germany, Carroll disavowed a controversial video posted on an Islamist website after her release and also revised her account of her captivity given on Iraqi TV.

"During my last night in captivity, my captors forced me to participate in a propaganda video. They told me they would let me go if I cooperated. I was living in a threatening environment, under their control, and wanted to go home alive. I agreed," the 28-year-old journalist said in a statement from Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

"Things that I was forced to say while captive are now being taken by some as an accurate reflection of my personal views. They are not," said the statement, read by the editor of the Boston-based newspaper The Christian Science Monitor on CNN.

The newspaper posted her full statement on its website, www.csmonitor.com.

Carroll arrived early Saturday at Ramstein Air Base in a US military aircraft. US officials said she declined a medical examination at nearby US Landstuhl Medical Center and would be heading back to the United States from Frankfurt.



Richard Bergenheim, who read out Carroll's statement at the newspaper's headquarters in Boston, said she was expected to arrive in the United States Sunday and reunite with her family in the Boston area.

Carroll was seized in Baghdad on January 7, and her translator was shot dead. She was freed Thursday and dropped off near the Baghdad office of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

Details of her release remain unclear, Bergenheim stressed.

"Neither we nor Jill's family, our government, nor anyone we know of negotiated on her behalf, paid anything on her behalf. We simply do not know the facts that surround why she happened to be released at that time," he said.

Soon after her release in Iraq, video footage posted on an Islamist website showed her praising Iraq's insurgents, even predicting their victory.

"I think the mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people that the American army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here, more clever," Carroll said in the video in response to a question.

Asked what she meant, Carroll said: "It makes very clear that the mujahedeen are the ones that will win in the end."

In her statement Saturday Carroll expressed anger at the people who snatched her in Baghdad and shot dead her Iraqi interpreter Alan Enwiya.

"Let me be clear: I abhor all who kidnap and murder civilians, and my captors are clearly guilty of both crimes," she said.

"I was, and remain, deeply angry with the people who did this," she said.

She also indicated that she felt unable to speak freely during an interview taped immediately after her release at the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party in which she said it was important for people to know that she had been well-treated by her kidnappers.

"The party had promised me the interview would never be aired on television, and broke their word," she said.

"At any rate, fearing retribution from my captors, I did not speak freely. Out of fear I said I wasn't threatened. In fact, I was threatened many times."

Carroll also refuted reports that she had refused to travel and cooperate with the US military or to discuss her captivity with US officials after her release.