Freed journalists: despair, then hope

Two journalists for the FOX News Channel, Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, were released Sunday in Gaza after being kidnapped and held for almost two weeks in circumstances that remain as murky as the heretofore unknown group responsible for the abduction, the Holy Jihad Brigades.

The two men, elated and emotional after their release, told reporters at a brief press conference at the Beach Hotel in Gaza, where they had just been dropped off, that they hoped that their kidnapping would not keep other foreign journalists from coming to Gaza to cover the Palestinian story.

But their kidnapping and the uncertain events that led to their freedom has already caused most news organizations to keep their international staff out of Gaza and brought calls to reassess how to cover the story safely.

Officials at the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority (PA) said they had exerted "huge efforts" in recent days to secure the journalists' release, but still did not know exactly who was responsible for kidnapping the men.

The Interior Minister said Hamas officials had not had any direct contact with the kidnappers, but that the Popular Resistance Committee (PRC), an amorphous group of Palestinian militants from different factions, played an intermediary role in negotiating with the abductors.

The kidnapping was unprecedented in that it was the longest period of time foreign reporters have ever been held in Gaza. Moreover, several videos made of the men, in the style of those made by the Iraqi insurgency, were released to local and international news channels – another first in Gaza.

A video Thursday made a sweeping demand for the release of all Muslims held in American jails. That bumped up the usually localized focus of Gaza militants – the conflict with Israel – to the more international arena.

In the last video, which appeared on a Palestinian TV station several hours before Messrs. Centanni and Wiig were set free, the militants dressed the journalists in local Arab robes and said they had converted to Islam.

"We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint," Centanni said just hours after the release of that video, in an interview with FOX immediately following his release. He added: "I have the highest respect for Islam and have learned many things about it. It was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns and we didn't know what ... was going on."

Centanni described his captivity on a live FOX television program, still breathless in the first hour following their unexpectedly hasty release. He shed light on the nature of their ordeal and how significantly it differed from previous abductions of journalists in Gaza.

"We were driving down a narrow side street in Gaza City," Centanni recalled. "There was a car stopped in front of us, and before we realized what it was, four of them [gunmen] came over to our car, and stuffed us in the back seat of a tiny Toyota and flipped a black hood over our heads," he said. "We were crunched down toward the floor and they sped away."

Soon afterwards, he said, "they searched our pockets and took everything away ... they sat us down and tied our hands behind our backs really tight. That was just the beginning of our torment that night."

He said that later, they were moved in a different car "with our heads between our knees so we couldn't see where we were going." They drove for about 10 minutes, he said, and then heard a garage door rattling open. "Everything was pitch black for us anyway. We were roughly taken out of the car," he said, where they heard a generator roaring loudly.

"I was thinking, Oh God, OK, a remote warehouse with a loud generator. We're toast. They could easily shoot us and no one would hear us."

Then, said Centanni, his tendency toward positive thinking prevailed. "I'm no good to them dead," he recalled telling himself, "so I kept my hopes up."

That night, he said, the two men were forced to lie face down on a dirt floor with their arms tied behind them in a painful position for at least two hours. He called to Wiig, who had been lying nearby. "He said, 'Yeah, I'm here, and I hurt ... but I'm here.' " The militants then prevented them from speaking further.

Centanni said they were forced to make several videos, to describe what they had reported on in Gaza as well as in other countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and were instructed to write down their life stories.

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