Jill Carroll Lands In Germany

Journalist Jill Carroll arrived in Germany on Saturday, the first stop as she headed home to the United States from Iraq where she was kidnapped and spent 82 days in captivity.

A military transport plane brought Carroll from Balad Air Base near Baghdad to Ramstein Air Base in western Germany. She was whisked away to a hotel at the air base, officials at Ramstein said. They said she was expected to leave for Boston later Saturday on a flight out of Frankfurt.

Carroll was riding in the cockpit as the U.S. Air Force C17 Globemaster came to a stop. She cast a bemused look at the line of television cameras waiting on the tarmac. She got off the plane smiling and wearing jeans, a gray sweater, and a desert camouflage jacket.

Col. Kurt Lohide, commander of the 435th Air Base Wing, greeted her briefly before escorting her into an Air Force van.

"Welcome to Ramstein," he said he told her.

"I'm happy to be here," was her answer.

The plane was a regularly scheduled flight from Balad carrying wounded military personnel.

From Ramstein the 28-year-old freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor was headed to Frankfurt by ground transport, where she was to fly on to Boston, officials said.

Carroll, a 28-year-old freelancer for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, was seized Jan. 7 in western Baghdad by gunmen who killed her Iraqi translator. She was dropped off Thursday at an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab organization, and later escorted by the U.S. military to the Green Zone, the fortified compound in Baghdad protecting the U.S. embassy and other facilities.

Jill Carroll, described as "emotionally fragile," went reluctantly to Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone — the place her captors had warned her was infiltrated with insurgents — and spent Friday in seclusion, recovering from 82 days of captivity.

After her three-month ordeal, Jill Carroll looked remarkably composed in a televised interview shortly after her release. But CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports that what was not filmed was the weeping young woman who walked through the door of the Iraqi Islamic Party office shortly before.

That's what Tariq al-Hashemi told CBS News about the emotional moment when Carroll suddenly appeared — and the hour it took to calm her down — before a Baghdad television station turned on the cameras.

Carroll's editor at the Christian Science Monitor described her as "emotionally fragile" after the ordeal.

Carroll agreed to be debriefed this morning, Logan reports, and her closest friend and colleague in Baghdad, Scott Peterson, told CBS News that she's still at the embassy, talking to everyone who wants to meet with her.

"Yesterday was way too soon. I think they're investigating whether she could leave today," said Richard Bergenheim, editor of the Boston-based newspaper. "But her family wants to make sure that she's strong enough, emotionally and otherwise, to take this step."

"It was like falling off a cliff for three months, waiting to hit the ground," Carroll told the Washington Post on Thursday after being released.

A second video was also released Thursday, Logan reports. Carroll's captors posted a propaganda interview on an Islamic Web site in which she praises the insurgents and spoke out against the U.S. military presence.

"Tens of thousands ... have lost their lives here because of the occupation," she said in the video. "I think Americans need to think about that and realize day-to-day how difficult life is here."

She said the insurgents were "only trying to defend their country ... to stop an illegal and dangerous and deadly occupation."

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Liz Colton declined comment, saying all queries regarding Carroll were being handled by her family and the Monitor.

Bergenheim said Carroll's parents, who spoke to her about the video, told him it was "conducted under duress."

In a statement on the newspaper's Web site, Carroll's father, Jim, said his daughter had been taught to fear her captors and was forced to make the video, reports Logan.

They had murdered her colleague when she was kidnapped, and she was told they had already killed another American hostage.

It wasn't clear why the kidnappers, who called themselves the Revenge Brigades, released Carroll. They had demanded the release of all female detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26, and said Carroll would be killed if that wasn't done.

U.S. officials did release some female detainees at the time, but said it had nothing to do with the kidnappers' demands. On Thursday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the United States is still holding four women.