A kidnapped reporter for Britain's The Guardian newspaper was freed Thursday, a day after he was snatched, a person involved in winning his release said.
The Guardian newspaper confirmed from London that Rory Carroll was released and unharmed.
A resident of Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood told The Associated Press that he was sitting next to the 33-year-old Carroll after his release. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want his involvement in the release to be known.
The resident said Caroll was kidnapped by criminals and that a group of Sadr City residents raided the area in which he was held and freed him.
His account of the release could not be confirmed.
Carroll, who is Irish, was on assignment for The Guardian when he was kidnapped Wednesday in Baghdad.
Elsewhere, ten masked gunmen kidnapped the lawyer for one of Saddam Hussein's co-defendants Thursday, police said. Saadoun Sughaiyer al-Janabi, who was in the courtroom for Wednesday's opening session of the trial, is one of two lawyers for Awad Hamed al-Bandar, one of seven Baath Party officials being tried with Saddam.
The gunmen pulled up outside al-Janabi's office in Baghdad's eastern Shaab district in the evening, broke into the building and dragged him out, said Police Maj. Falah al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry.
In related developments:
The secretary-general of the Arab League arrived Thursday on his first visit to Iraq since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein, hoping to organize a national reconciliation conference. Amr Moussa came to Baghdad from Cairo with a delegation of 34 Arab League members guarded under tight security. Another Arab League delegation was attacked by gunmen last week while in the Iraqi capital to prepare Moussa's trip.Insurgents using explosives set fire to the main oil pipeline in the north on Thursday, officials said. The pipeline links an oil field in the northern city of Kirkuk to the country's largest oil refinery in Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. The attacks come one day after Saddam and seven senior members of his regime went on trial for a 1982 massacre of about 150 Shiites in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad. CBS News correspondent Lara Logan reports that because Saddam refused to recognize the authority of the judges and would not identify himself, it was clear he intended to hijack the proceedings. Saddam pleaded innocent to all charges. The judge adjourned the trial until Nov. 28.Gunmen in a car opened fire on civilians outside a food shop in southern Baghdad, killing two, said police Capt. Firas Gaiti. The militants then stopped, rushed into the store and gunned down a third Iraqi, Gaiti said.About an hour later, a rocket hit a public school for students aged 12 to 15 in western Baghdad, killing one child and wounding five, said police Capt. Qassim Hussein. The blast also killed a nearby shopkeeper, said Hussein.The U.S. military said four Army soldiers were killed and five wounded by roadside bombs Wednesday near the northern cities of Balad and Tikrit, Saddam's hometown. Another American soldier died from a gunshot wound Tuesday at a military base near Mosul; the death was not from hostile fire, the military said. The fatalities raised to at least 1,987 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.On Wednesday, insurgents killed 26 Iraqis in widespread attacks, including three election commission officials who were shot on the outskirts of the capital in Abu Ghraib as they drove home after another round of counting ballots from the weekend constitutional referendum, police said.The prosecutor's office at Spain's National Court has asked the tribunal not to issue an international arrest warrant for three U.S soldiers whose tank fired on a Baghdad hotel during the Iraq war, killing a Spanish journalist and one other, a court official said on Thursday. "Spain lacks jurisdiction to investigate causes of death in a military conflict and death of a Spanish citizen resulting from U.S military gunfire," prosecutor Pedro Rubira said in his appeal.A spokesman for The Guardian confirmed Carroll's release and said he was awaiting details.
Joe Carroll told The Guardian his son had called him at home in Dublin.
"He told me that he had been released, that he was perfectly OK and in an Iraqi government compound having a beer," the elder Carroll was quoted as saying.
He said his son had been in a cell "and representatives of the Iraqi government came for me, they had a government car waiting. I have been in Baghdad all the time."
Carroll, who had been in Iraq for about nine months, has previously reported for the Guardian from South Africa and Rome.
It was not clear where Carroll was abducted. Sadr City is an overwhelmingly Shiite neighborhood of eastern Baghdad where a Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, holds sway. The militia is known to aggressively keep other gunmen out of the neighborhood.
In October last year, an American photographer, Paul Taggert, was abudcted in Sadr City and held for three days before being released unharmed. Representatives of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who heads the Mahdi Army, said they mediated to win his release.