American journalist Jill Carroll who spent 82 days in captivity after she was kidnapped in Iraq, arrived in Germany this morning, the first stop on her way home to the United States.
A military transport plane brought Carroll from Balad Air Base near Baghdad to Ramstein Air Base in western Germany. She was whisked away to a hotel at the air base, officials at Ramstein said. They said she was expected to leave for Boston later Saturday on a flight out of Frankfurt.
Carroll, a 28-year-old freelancer for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, was seized January 7th in western Baghdad by gunmen who killed her Iraqi translator.
She was dropped off Thursday at an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab organization, and later escorted by the US military to the Green Zone, the fortified compound in Baghdad protecting the US embassy and other facilities.
It wasn't clear why the kidnappers, who called themselves the Revenge Brigades, released Carroll. They had demanded the release of all female detainees in Iraq, and said Carroll would be killed if that wasn't done.
US officials did release some female detainees at the time, but said it had nothing to do with the kidnappers' demands. On Thursday, US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the United States is still holding four women.