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Kidnapped U.S. Reporter Jill Carroll Freed

Click the listen link to hear Monica Brady-Meyerov's report on the reaction at the Christian Science Monitor in Boston on the morning of Jill Carroll's release.

(See the link below for audio of the press conference at the Christian Science Center.)

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BAGHDAD, AP: Kidnapped U.S. reporter Jill Carroll has been released after nearly three months in captivity, Iraq police and the leader of the Islamic Party said Thursday. Her editor said she was in good condition.

"She was released this morning, she's talked to her father and she's fine," said David Cook, Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor.

Carroll, 28, was kidnapped on Jan. 7 in Baghdad's western Adil neighborhood while going to interview Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi. Her translator was killed in the attack about 300 yards from al-Dulaimi's office.

Her captors, calling themselves the Revenge Brigades, had demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26 and said Carroll would be killed if that didn't happen. The date came and went with no word about her welfare.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad said it could not confirm Carroll's release.

Carroll had been working as a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, having gone to the Middle East in 2002 after being laid off from a newspaper job. She had dreamed her entire life of covering a war.

In American Journal Review last year, Carroll wrote that she moved to Jordan in late 2002, six months before the war started, "to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began."

"There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn't want to be a part of that," she wrote.

Carroll has had work from Iraq published in the Monitor, AJR, U.S. News & World Report, an Italian news wire and other publications. She has been interviewed often on National Public Radio.

On Wednesday, Carroll's sister pleaded for her release on Arab television, saying her sister is a "wonderful person" who is an "innocent woman." Katie Carroll read a statement on the Al-Arabiya network, noting that there had been no word from her sister's captors in Iraq in almost two months.

"I've been living a nightmare, worrying if she is hurt or ill," Katie Carroll said, according to a transcript released by the Christian Science Monitor.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

This program aired on March 30, 2006. The audio for this program is not available.

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