4 Suspects Held in Abduction of U.S. Reporter

Marines have arrested four men suspected of kidnapping American journalist Jill Carroll and holding her captive for 82 days early this year, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.

The four suspects were detained in Al Anbar province at least a month ago, another officer said.

The military decided to release details about the arrests in advance of Carroll’s upcoming 11-part series in the Christian Science Monitor detailing her kidnapping and captivity, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said at a news briefing in Baghdad.

The 28-year-old freelance reporter was abducted in early January in the Iraqi capital and freed March 30. She has since returned to the United States.

Marines believe they have identified several places where Carroll was held, including a site about nine miles west of Fallouja. A lieutenant with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, noticed that the house matched the description of a place he had read about in intelligence reports, Caldwell said.

Marines detained the owner of the house, who led them to another location, Caldwell said. At the second home, Marines found a man believed to be a member of the Mujahedin Shura Council, an organization affiliated with the group Al Qaeda in Iraq.

That suspect’s information in turn led soldiers with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division to a third house, north of the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, where troops dismantled booby traps before freeing two Iraqi hostages. Americans also raided a fourth site, but Caldwell provided few details about it.

The names of the four men are being withheld until American and Iraqi authorities decide how to prosecute them, the U.S. military said.

Carroll, working as a freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor, was abducted Jan. 7 in west Baghdad. Gunmen ambushed the journalist and killed her interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, 32, as the pair left the office of a prominent Sunni Arab politician.

During her captivity, Carroll was forced to appear on videotapes pleading for her life.

“I’m with the mujahedin,” Carroll said during one recording. “I’m here. I’m fine. Please, just do whatever they want, give them whatever they want, as quickly as possible. This is a very short time. Please do it fast. That is all.”

Her kidnappers, a previously unknown group calling itself the Revenge Brigades, demanded the release of all Iraqi female prisoners. The military did release some women from detention but said the move was unrelated to Carroll’s captivity.

Carroll’s 11-part series, which begins Sunday night on the newspaper’s website, will detail how she was moved more than a dozen times, lived in close contact with Sunni Arab mujahedin and was forced to “interview” her chief captor for hours at a time, the Monitor says on its website.

The military also said Wednesday that three U.S. soldiers assigned to the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, died in Al Anbar province during the day.

Meanwhile, the search continued for two crew members with the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing whose Black Hawk helicopter crashed Tuesday after a malfunction. Four troops on board were rescued.

Caldwell said that the craft crashed in water and that dive teams had been dispatched to carry out the search. It was unclear whether the helicopter went down in a lake or a river in mostly arid Al Anbar.

Gunmen, explosions and a suicide bomber killed 16 people around the capital Wednesday.

The deaths came as morgue officials released new statistics showing that more Iraqis were killed in the Baghdad area in July than in any recent month, Reuters reported. During the month, 1,815 bodies were brought to the morgue, the news service said.

In June, 1,595 bodies were brought to the central morgue.

Outside the capital, an explosion near a mosque killed four people in Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

In northern Iraq, near Kirkuk, a roadside bomb exploded, killing two brothers. In the city itself, police recovered a decapitated body.

In the southern city of Basra, gunmen killed a man.

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Times staff writers Shamil Aziz and Saif Hameed contributed to this report.