Jill Carroll, a U.S. freelance journalist in Iraq kidnapped on Jan. 7, could be executed today by her captors.
An excerpt from the CTV.ca story:
The father of an American journalist being held hostage in Iraq pleaded for her release Friday, as the deadline set by the kidnappers was set to expire.
"I want to speak directly to the men holding my daughter Jill because they may also be fathers like me," Jim Carroll said in the statement that aired Friday on the Arabic-language network Al-Jazeera.
"My daughter does not have the ability to free anyone. She is a reporter and an innocent person. Do not sacrifice an innocent soul ... as a father, I appeal to you to release my daughter for the betterment of all of us. And I ask the men holding my daughter to work with Jill to find a way to initiate a dialogue with me."
The kidnappers that nabbed Jill Carroll gave the United States until Friday to release all female Iraqi detainees, or else they would kill Carroll. They are a previously unknown group, calling themselves the "Revenge Brigade."
Carroll, a 28-year-old freelancer for the Christian Science Monitor, was grabbed Jan. 7 in a dangerous Baghdad neighbourhood near the office of a prominent Sunni Arab politician, Adnan al-Dulaimi, who she had been going to interview.
Gunmen ambushed her car and killed her translator shortly after she left the offices of al-Dulaimi, who failed to show up for the interview.
On Friday, Al-Dulaimi appealed for Carroll's release, and said he would work on getting the women detainees set free.