Iraqis Optimistic Reporter Is Alive

Iraqi officials believe kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll is alive and they are optimistic about her release.

Iraq's interior minister said Monday that he believes Carroll is alive and will be released, even though the Sunday deadline set by her kidnappers had passed.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr also said he knew who abducted the 28-year-old journalist last month.

"We know his name and address, and we are following up on him as well as the Americans," he told ABC News. "I think she is still alive."

Meanwhile, sectarian violence appeared to be receding throughout the country and Sunni Arabs signaled they may be ready to return to talks to form a new Iraqi government.

In other developments:

Acting on a tip from residents, Interior Ministry forces captured a top aide to al Qaeda Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during a raid in western Iraq, a security official said Monday. The official, a member of the ministry's counterinsurgency Wolf Brigade, identified the key al Qaeda figure as Abu al-Farouq, who was previously unknown. The officer said al-Farouq and five other al Qaeda operatives were captured based on a tip from residents near al-Bakr, about 30 miles west of the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi.

Saddam Hussein has ended his hunger strike for health reasons. His lawyers said he has lost weight but won't say how much. Saddam stopped eating 11 days ago to protest his mass murder trial in Baghdad.

There was some violence Monday but it looks more like a return to Iraq's everyday insurgent violence, and not the Shi'ite-on-Sunni tension that had briefly turned neighbor against neighbor, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports. A car bomb exploded in Baghdad's Shula neighborhood, killing four people, and a mortar landed in the International Zone, where most of the foreign embassies are located. But the curfew across this city has been lifted, traffic is heavy, and it looks like the worst of the crisis is past.

The German government on Monday denied a New York Times report that its intelligence service passed information about Saddam Hussein's plan for defending Baghdad to the United States a month before the U.S.-led invasion.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, also said Monday that he believed Carroll was alive.

"I have discussed the issue with the interior minister," Khalilzad said Monday. "She clearly is in a dangerous situation, but we're working hard with the Iraqis and others to get her released."

All the attention focused on the mob violence here may actually be good for Carroll's case because the abductors want maximum publicity, and they know they're not going to get that right now, reports Dozier.

Carroll, a freelancer working for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted Jan. 7 in Baghdad and was last seen on a videotape broadcast Feb. 10 by a Kuwaiti television station, Al-Rai. The station said the kidnappers threatened to kill her unless the United States met unspecified demands by Sunday.

The four people killed in the Monday mortar attack died when several shells exploded near the Nasir Market in the mostly Shiite Shula area of western Baghdad, police said.

The city was otherwise generally peaceful Monday – the first day without extended curfews or a ban on private vehicles since the bombing of a Shiite shrine triggered attacks against Sunni mosques in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere and pushed the nation to the brink of civil war.

• no previous page
• next

1/2