German Demanded $2 Million To Set Hostage Free
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON – German authorities have arrested a man who is accused of trying to extort $2 million from the Christian Science Monitor by promising to win the release of American reporter Jill Carroll, who was freed from captivity in Baghdad yesterday.
A U.S. arrest warrant and FBI affidavit made public yesterday by federal prosecutors in Washington said that Kelvin Kamara, a west African native living in Germany, struck up an e-mail exchange with a Monitor editor in Washington little more than a month after Ms. Carroll’s abduction in early January. Kamara, calling himself Saidu Mohammed, said he knew who was holding Carroll and could arrange her freedom in exchange for the payment, the FBI affidavit said.
Mr. Kamara said he was working with two brigades who were willing to free Ms. Carroll from her captors, but were demanding ransom. “…you can raise two million dollars or else jill is likely to become history,” Mr. Kamara wrote on February 14 from a Yahoo mail account.
David Cook, chief of the paper’s Washington bureau, alerted the FBI in an effort to determine if the person on other end of the e-mails really could help find Ms. Carroll, the court papers said. FBI counterterrorism agents quickly decided he could not and turned the probe over to fraud investigators.
Working with Mr. Cook and German police, FBI agents quickly zeroed in on Mr. Kamara, who they learned was living in the German city of Muenster. He was arrested March 16.
Mr. Kamara, who used several aliases, is a Nigerian or Liberian by birth who is in his late 20s. He also appeared to use his e-mail account to send out solicitations for “what are commonly referred to as Nigerian advance fee schemes,” the affidavit said.
Earlier, a Pentagon spokesman said that the U.S. military was not involved in Carroll’s release. Bryan Whitman said it is also not yet clear whether the military will play any role in her transportation out of Iraq.
He added, however that there are still five female detainees being held in detention facilities in Iraq. Earlier in Carroll’s nearly three-month kidnapping, her captors, a previously unknown group calling itself the Revenge Brigades, publicly demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq. A short time later five female detainees were released.
