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Canadian journo freed in Iraq
14/09/2004 06:56 - (SA)
Ottawa - Kidnappers have released a Canadian journalist abducted in Iraq last week and threatened with beheading, the foreign ministry said on Monday.
Scott Taylor, a warfare specialist and editor of the magazine Esprit de Corps, published by the defence ministry, told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper he was kidnapped by a Turkmen Shiite group in the town of Tall Afar, 450 kilometres north of Baghdad.
Taylor said he was later handed over to another group of non-Arabs and taken to Mosul, where he was freed on the weekend without explanation after being beaten and threatened with death.
"Six times in those five days I was convinced I was going to die right there on the spot," he told the newspaper from a town in southeastern Turkey near the Iraq border.
"I can barely walk from the beatings I got, but it was the mental torture of thinking six times you're about to die that's tough," he said.
"Turkish intelligence people say I'm the only Westerner ever released by the al-Qaeda group and they can't understand why," he told the daily.
In Ottawa, the foreign affairs ministry said little about the story.
A spokesperson said Taylor was received late on Monday at the Canadian embassy in Ankara.
"I will not tell you anything more," the spokesperson, Reynald Doiron, said.
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