Mennonite Weekly Review

Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll believes she may have been held hostage in Iraq by the same insurgent group that held four Christian Peacemaker Teams activists and killed one of them earlier this year.

In an Aug. 16 story in the Monitor, which has been publishing Carroll’s account of her kidnapping and subsequent release by Sunni insurgents in Iraq, similarities between the Carroll and CPT kidnappings are seen as indicating a possible connection.

Ties also appeared to exist between Carroll’s captivity and that of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, French journalist Florence Aubenas and aid worker Margaret Hassan, who was murdered.

“Since my captors viewed all mujahideen as part of the same worldwide movement … it is unclear how many of these kidnappings were carried out by the same individuals who took me, and how many were carried out by separate but allied groups,” Carroll said in the Monitor story.

The four CPTers — Canadians Jim Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, British citizen Norman Kember and American Tom Fox — were kidnapped in Baghdad on Nov. 26. Fox was found shot to death in Baghdad on March 9. The other three were freed by a British commando raid on March 23.

The Monitor reported that around Feb. 27, Carroll’s captors told her they recently had killed an American, whom she believes may have been Fox, because the United States had not freed a prisoner believed to be Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric sentenced to life in prison for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Though Fox’s body was discovered March 9, and Iraqi authorities said he had been dead only about 24 hours when he was found, the coincidence seems to imply a connection between Carroll’s and the CPTers’ captors, the Monitor reported.

Loney told the Monitor that their captors had said they were demanding the release of a blind U.S. prisoner, possibly Abdel-Rahman.

In an interview with MWR in April, Loney said the three other CPT hostages did not know for certain that Fox had been killed until after they were freed by coalition forces.

Loney told MWR that Fox had been separated from the other three in mid-February, ostensibly to move him, and then the others, to another location in preparation for their release.

When the CPTers were rescued, Carroll — who was released March 30 — said she was told a ransom had been paid for their freedom, the Monitor reported.

CPT has denied any knowledge of a ransom being paid for the hostages.