U.S. Civilian Hostage Safe After an Apparent Escape

Thomas Hamill, an American truck driver kidnapped last month during an insurgent attack on a supply convoy, was found alive Sunday after he apparently escaped from his captors and presented himself to passing Army troops, military officials said.

A U.S. patrol found Hamill -- a 43-year-old struggling dairy farmer from Mississippi who came to Iraq to earn money as a civilian contract worker -- in the city of Balad, north of Baghdad, at about 11:15 a.m., officials said.

“He came out of a building and identified himself to American soldiers,” said Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief military spokesman, who pronounced Hamill in good health. “He is now ready to go back to work,” Kimmitt added, apparently in jest.

U.S. officials welcomed the driver’s safe return as a instance of good news at a time when the military in Iraq faces an upsurge in casualties -- at least 136 American troops died in April, the highest monthly figure since the U.S. invasion last spring.

The bloodshed persisted Sunday, when 11 more U.S. troops were reported killed, among them six felled in a mortar attack near the city of Ramadi, to the west of Fallouja in Iraq’s Sunni Muslim heartland. The strike, the latest in a series of devastating mortar and rocket assaults, also left 30 Americans wounded. About 750 U.S. soldiers have died since the war began, according to unofficial tallies.

In Hamill’s home of Macon, Miss., ecstatic celebration broke out at the news that he was safe.

“We’re all on cloud nine,” said Phyllis Hamill, the former captive’s mother.

Many viewed the happy news as an answer to their prayers. The town’s mayor, Dorothy Baker Hines, said she had spoken with Hamill’s wife, Kellie, and conveyed the town’s relief.

“I just told her, ‘Tell Tommy, when you talk to him, that we’ll have a parade so long it will never end,’ ” Hines said.

Hamill was found at a site about 50 miles north of where he was captured, along a major highway on the western outskirts of Baghdad, officials said.

Hamill had been seen on two videotapes provided to television channels. The first showed him held captive in the back seat of a sedan as a gunman gestured menacingly. The sedan suddenly accelerated, whisking Hamill away as it passed black smoke emanating from one or more of the burning vehicles in the doomed convoy.

The second tape featured Hamill in front of an Iraqi flag, his expression calm but wary as his captors threatened to kill him unless the Marines ended their assault on the city of Fallouja.

Hamill’s fuel convoy was attacked April 9, at a time when a rash of convoy ambushes and kidnappings of Westerners was unnerving occupation forces and the thousands of civilian contract workers who assist the U.S.-led coalition.

Army Pfc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, was captured during the same convoy strike that led to Hamill’s abduction. A videotape of Maupin in custody also has been broadcast on television. Officials voiced hope that Maupin is still alive, but his fate remains unclear.

Another soldier, Sgt. Elmer C. Krause, 40, of Greensboro, N.C., was killed in the same convoy attack. The bodies of four other civilians in that convoy were later found in a shallow grave near the attack site.

As many as 40 people from several countries were taken hostage last month. Most have been released.

Among those still missing are three Italian security guards among four snatched during an insurgent attack. The fourth Italian was killed and a tape of his slaying was provided to an Arab-language television channel. The tape was judged too gruesome to air.

Hamill and the other civilians in his convoy were working for KBR -- formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root -- a Houston-based firm that is a major contractor for U.S. forces here. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services giant.

Following his apparent escape, Hamill flagged down a National Guard unit that was on patrol. “They were approached by a wounded man claiming to be an American,” said Maj. Neal E. O’Brien, spokesman for the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, which occupies the zone to the north of Baghdad.

Hamill was receiving medical treatment for undisclosed reasons but his condition was described as stable. One military official said he had a gunshot wound to his left arm. In the videotape from the ambush scene, one arm appeared to be bandaged.

Hamill’s compelling story had become emblematic of contractors who have agreed to take risky jobs in the war zone in an effort to improve their financial lot. Civilian truck drivers can earn $80,000 a year or more.

There is no official count, but dozens of civilian contract workers are believed to have been killed in Iraq. Insurgents view contractors as collaborators in what the armed opposition calls an illegal occupation. Many have been gunned down in four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Like Hamill, many civilian contractors have been drawn to Iraq by the promise of hefty, tax-free salaries. The U.S. government is pouring billions into the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, much of it being funneled through private contractors like KBR.

In Hamill’s case, the farmer had struggled to maintain a dairy business that had been in his family in Macon for three decades. He eventually sold his cows and the dairy business and signed on last fall to drive a fuel truck in Iraq.

Following his rescue, the military said, Hamill led troops to the house where he had been held captive in the city of Balad, northwest of Baghdad. Soldiers detained two Iraqis and confiscated an AK-47 rifle, the military said.

Troops called for a medevac helicopter and Hamill was taken to a nearby military base, where he was treated. He was later transported to Baghdad.

In other military action, two U.S. soldiers were killed and two injured early Sunday when a roadside bomb struck their convoy in northwest Baghdad, the military said.

Overnight, Shiite militiamen attacked another American convoy with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades near the southern city of Amarah, almost 200 miles southeast of Baghdad. Two soldiers were killed and six wounded, the military said.

And a bomb and an exchange of small-arms fire left one soldier dead and 10 wounded Sunday near the northern city of Kirkuk.

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Staff writer Ellen Barry contributed from Atlanta.