Posted on 04/17/2004 6:07:55 AM PDT by paolop
Translation of article in la Republica, url is http://www.repubblica.it/2004/d/sezioni/politica/iraqita2/francese/francese.html
The French journalist kidnapped, then released after four days, talks about his days in captivity. “Merciless regarding your co-nationals”
Rome – The Italian hostages are “Friends of the devil” and for this “we will gut them.” This was what the kidnappers of the French journalist Alexander Jordanov, kidnapped, then released on the very day that the kidnappers executed Fabrizio Quattrocchi told him during his captivity.
Interviewed on the TV station Tg1, Jordanov reconstructs the days of his kidnapping. Still shaken, both physically and psychologically, he does not wish to recount the more violent and humiliating details of his captivity. He only tells of his being “beaten” initially, and then being treated as a “beast”, and constantly under threat of death.
“They moved us constantly”, the French journalist recounts, “we were taken to ten different places, and almost each time the group of kidnappers would change, from ex-Saddam people to the Shiites of Alk Sadr, to Sunnis.”
In his opinion, the guerillas were “clearly well trained for the kidnapping operations, they all seemed to know one another, and to have a single password, “Sunnis and Shiites, the Iraqis resistance is united.”
Alex recounts of being constantly interrogated, and of being accused of being an American or Israeli spy, “I would go from hope to the deepest desperation”. We talked a lot about the Italian hostages, and they were very tough on them. They defined them “friends of the devil”, and shouted that they “would gut them”.
Jordanov says that he was, “lucky to end up in the hands of Sunnis, “Nobody negotiated with me. I believe that it was a human relationship that was created with this group of kidnappers. It was they who brought me to a Baghdad mosque. It was only when the Imam said to me, ‘that is the door, you are free’, that I really belied it.”
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