Two Spanish journalists freed in Syria: employer

MADRID, Spain – Two Spanish journalists taken hostage in Syria by an Al-Qaeda-linked group were freed after 6 months in captivity and were heading back to Spain on Sunday, March 30, one of their employers said.

El Mundo correspondent Javier Espinosa, 49, and freelance photographer Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, 42, were “freed and handed over to the Turkish military,” the Spanish newspaper said on its website.

Espinosa called El Mundo’s offices on Saturday evening, March 29, and said they were in good health, it added. The paper said the two journalists would fly back to Madrid on Sunday, without specifying the time.

“Pure happiness,” wrote Espinosa’s girlfriend, the journalist Monica Garcia Prieto, on Twitter early Sunday, without giving further details.

“It has been a hard few months. We knew the wait would be long but you never get used to it,” said the director of El Mundo’s international pages, Ana Alonso Montes.

“You never know when the moment of liberation will come, although we never doubted it would,” she told national radio.

Espinosa and Vilanova were seized on September 16, 2013 at Syria’s border with Turkey, the latest of scores of journalists captured while covering Syria’s civil war.

There was no immediate word on Sunday on whether any demands were made by their kidnappers or any ransom paid.

El Mundo identified the captors as members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a jihadist faction in Syria with roots in Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate.

The newspaper had kept the kidnapping quiet until December 2013 while it contacted the captors via intermediaries. It said at that time that the kidnappers had made no demands.

Espinosa has been a Middle East correspondent for El Mundo since 2002 and is based in Beirut.

Like Vilanova, he has covered some of the most dangerous points in the Syrian conflict, including the siege of Homs in February 2012.

On February 22, 2012, he escaped that bloodbath in which human rights groups said 700 people were killed and thousands injured, and made it back to Lebanon a week later.

Among those killed in Homs were two other Western journalists: US reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik.

Espinosa wrote of his escape from the city, under fire among a crowd of wounded refugees, in a compelling reportage published in March 2013.

“We believe the Syrian people need our work, and that we must live up to our responsibility,” said Prieto, who is also a prize-winning journalist, in December 2013.

An online forum that frequently features statements from jihadists had also called on the militants to free the two.

The Honein jihadist forum said the two journalists were a “good hand for advocating our issues in Iraq and Syria, and carrying the silenced truth.”

Garcia Vilanova has contributed to Agence France-Presse and other world media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders ranks Syria as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

A third Spanish journalist seized separately in Syria in September 2013, Marc Marginedas, a correspondent for the Catalan daily El Periodico, was freed early March 2014.

Four French journalists, kidnapped 9 months ago, remain in captivity in Syria. – Rappler.com