Freed journalist's family thanks supporters

updated 9:00 p.m. ET March 30, 2006

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - The phone rang just before 6 a.m. After three months of captivity in Iraq, freelance reporter Jill Carroll called her dad to let him know she was alive — and free.

“It was quite a wake-up call, to say the least,” Jim Carroll said Thursday outside his home. “She’s doing well. I was glad to see her on TV this morning. She’s apparently in good health and mentally strong and we’re all very pleased about that.”

Jill Carroll was heading to an interview with a Sunni Arab politician in Baghdad on Jan. 7 when she was kidnapped. Her translator was killed, and her captors, calling themselves the Revenge Brigades, demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26 or they would kill Carroll, too.

The date came and went with no word about her welfare.

Then, Thursday morning, her father picked up the phone to the sound of her voice: “Hi Dad. This is Jill. I’m released,” CNN reported were her words.

She had been left in a Baghdad street near the Iraqi Islamic Party offices, walked inside, and the people there called American officials.

“I was treated well, but I don’t know why I was kidnapped,” she said in a brief interview on Baghdad television.

Reunion with family planned
Near Chicago, her mother, Mary Beth Carroll, said she was trying to figure out the travel plans so she could hug her daughter again.

“We’re thrilled,” she told The Associated Press in a quick phone call.

Her father, in Chapel Hill, thanked all the family’s supporters in the U.S. and Iraq and The Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper for which she had been writing.

“We’ve had an arduous three months,” Jim Carroll said. “It’s been very, very difficult on the family and all of the friends, and obviously all the people around the world.

“The media coverage on Jill has been amazing. We couldn’t believe it. We certainly appreciate that.”

The news of Jill Carroll’s release quickly spread across the campus of her alma mater, the University of Massachusetts, in the Michigan town where grew up and elsewhere.

President Bush, in Mexico, responded to the news with the words: “Thank God.”

“I’m just really grateful she was released,” Bush said. “I’m glad she’s alive.”

No involvement from military
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. military was not involved in Carroll’s release.

Meanwhile, German authorities said Thursday they arrested a man who is accused of trying to extort $2 million from the Christian Science Monitor by promising to win Carroll’s release.

A U.S. arrest warrant and FBI affidavit made public Thursday by federal prosecutors in Washington said that Kelvin Kamara, a west African native living in Germany, struck up an e-mail exchange with a Monitor editor in Washington little more than a month after Carroll’s abduction in early January. Kamara, calling himself Saidu Mohammed, said he knew who was holding Carroll and could arrange her freedom in exchange for the payment, the FBI affidavit said.

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