Released Australian hostage returns home
An Australian engineer rescued from insurgents in Baghdad arrived in his home country today and immediately apologised for his televised plea for coalition forces to withdraw from Iraq.
The world discovered Douglas Wood had been abducted on May 1 when his captors released video images showing him with automatic weapons pointed at his head as he pleaded for US, British and Australian forces to pull out of Iraq. He had been abducted a day earlier when lured to what he thought was a business meeting.
But at his first media conference since his dramatic rescue last week, the 64-year-old California resident told reporters at Melbourne airport he supported the coalition forces’ role in Iraq.
“Frankly I’d like to apologise to both President George Bush and Prime Minister John Howard for the things I said under duress,” said Wood, with his American wife Yvonne Given and his brothers Vernon and Malcolm and their wives by his side.
“I actually believe that I am proof positive that the current policy of training the Iraqi army … works because it was Iraqis that got me out,” he added.
Iraqi and US troops freed Wood during a search last Wednesday of a house in a dangerous section of Baghdad. Insurgents had held him for ransom for 47 days.
Wood had been working for more than a year in Iraq as a self-employed contractor, and said he was considering whether to return. His brothers urged him against it.
Australia sent a hostage negotiation team with elite troops to Iraq to try to secure his freedom. The government refused the kidnappers’ demands for Australia to withdraw its 1,400 troops from Iraq and pay a ransom.
Wood described his treatment at the hands of the kidnappers – who kicked him in the head and shaved off his hair – as “a bit intimidating”. He said he sometimes feared he would not survive the ordeal.
Wood declined to discuss his captors, saying it was too traumatic.
Asked if he was feeling fragile after his ordeal, he said: “Not especially. I’ve got some physical ailments and I’ve been deprived of medication for a bit.”
Wood suffers a heart condition, but his captors gave him medication apparently passed to them by a senior Australian Islamic cleric who was working to secure his release.
Mark Klemens, a spokesman for Wood, later said the former hostage had signed an exclusive deal with an Australian television network to tell his story.
Sheik Taj El Din al-Hilaly, an Egyptian-born Sunni cleric who flew from his Sydney home shortly after the abduction to negotiate Wood’s release, claims the hostage was to have been freed later on the day of his rescue.
The sheik returned to Sydney today and declared his mission a success. Wood said he had not heard of the cleric while he was in captivity.
Howard said he received a briefing from the head of the Australian hostage team, Nick Warner, last night. Warner confirmed Wood was picked up by US and Iraqi forces in a sweep-and-cordon operation.
Howard welcomed Wood’s apology, but said he had not sought it. “After what that poor man has been through, that would be the last thing I would want,” Howard said.
Wood said he did not know who the insurgents were who kidnapped him.
“I didn’t know whether it was al-Qaida or who it was,” he said. “I didn’t know … obviously, my head is intact, so it wasn’t al-Qaida.”
