Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
A female Iraqi Sunni member of parliament who was kidnapped almost two months ago has been freed by her captors, state television reported Saturday.
Taiseer al-Mashhadani, a member of the Sunni National Concord Front -- the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc -- was snatched on July 1 along with her seven bodyguards in a Baghdad ambush.
"She was released after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki made a plea for her release and she was now in his office," Al-Iraqiya television reported, without giving any details of the release.
Two of her bodyguards had already been released.
Sunni leaders had suggested that Mashhadani's captors were Shiite militiamen who had demanded the release of 25 prisoners held in US detention centres in Iraq as a condition for her freedom.
jds/dc/srm
Iraq-unrest-Sunni-release
AFP 261417 GMT 08 06
COPYRIGHT 2006 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
