Jill Carroll a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor who was kidnapped on 7 January 2006 in Iraq was released by her kidnappers last night. Although there was numerous death threats,she states that she was never abused by her captors.

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Oh man...Great news!

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lakritze,

Yes! Good news indeed!

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Awesome!

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She is a very very very very very lucky girl.

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That is good news.

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Two Canadians & a Brit were freed last week, too. It wasn't the hostages releasing them, it was the tactical forces finding them. Was it a different scenario for Ms. Carroll?

An article on The Christian Science Monitor Web site on Friday said a video Ms. Carroll made with her captors shortly before her release had been produced under duress and did not represent her beliefs.

In the video, distributed on the Internet, Ms. Carroll, wearing a pale head scarf and apparently knowing she would be released, calmly answered questions asked in English by one of her captors. She denounced the "lies" told by the American government and predicted that the insurgents would defeat the Americans in Iraq.

The video had raised questions about whether Ms. Carroll was suffering from Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages become sympathetic to their captors, or had made the statements either out of fear or as a practical matter, to facilitate her release.

The Monitor article states that Ms. Carroll's captors approached her the night before her release, saying "they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States." According to her father, Jim Carroll, who was interviewed for the Monitor article, "she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq."

Mr. Carroll is quoted as saying the captors "obviously wanted maximum propaganda value in the U.S. After listening to them for three months she already knew exactly what they wanted her to say, so she gave it to them with appropriate acting to make it look convincing."