Captors say they’ll kill journalist

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The captors of an American journalist kidnapped in Baghdad 10 days ago threatened to kill her in three days unless authorities freed all female prisoners in Iraq, according to an Arabic television network that aired a brief video of the woman Tuesday night.

Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter based in Baghdad, was shown speaking, but there was no sound with the video shown by al-Jazeera. Her skin was pale and her dark hair was pulled back from her face and straying in untidy strands. She appeared to be exhausted, but her face remained composed as she spoke.

The clip was the first sight of Carroll, 28, since she was abducted by gunmen in Baghdad as she left the office of Sunni Arab politician Adnan Dulaimi on Jan. 7. Her Iraqi interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, was shot and killed.

CBS News reported that the name “Vengeance Brigade” appeared on a banner partially obscured by al-Jazeera’s logo when the tape aired. A group by that name kidnapped a Swedish Iraqi politician in early 2005 and released him after demanding millions of dollars in ransom. It was not known if any ransom was paid in that case. Groups in Iraq often adopt and change names at will, and it was not known if the same band was responsible for both abductions.

Insurgent groups in Iraq often include among their demands the freeing of female detainees held by U.S. forces here. Shortly after the Carroll kidnapping, protesters at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad that had been raided by U.S. and Iraqi forces spoke angrily of what they said was the U.S. detention of a Sunni woman and her young daughter from the community of Abu Ghraib just outside the capital. U.S. authorities have not confirmed such a detention.

“Jill is an innocent journalist and we respectfully ask that you please show her mercy and allow her to return home,” Carroll’s family asked her abductors in a message issued by her father, Jim, and posted on the Web site of the Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper for which Carroll, a freelancer, was working.

The statement said Carroll “has been dedicated to bringing the truth of the Iraq war to the world.”