A “STROKE of luck” freed seven American prisoners of war in northern Iraq yesterday after their captors had fled American forces advancing on Saddam Hussein’s home city of Tikrit.

A Canadian journalist said that the prisoners, five of whom were paraded on Iraqi television last month, were found as a reconnaissance patrol moved down a side road to stop traffic interfering with the advance of coalition forces. Their discovery was down to luck, the journalist, who was travelling with the Marine unit that rescued them, said.

News of the rescue was greeted with jubilation by the soldiers’ families. Some wept with relief as they watched television pictures of their sons and daughter landing at a US Marine base 55 miles south of Baghdad, minutes before being airlifted to a US military hospital in Kuwait. Five of the PoWs were part of the 15-member US Army maintenance company convoy that was ambushed after taking a wrong turn near the southern Iraqi town of al-Nasiriyah on March 23. They had spent 22 days in Iraqi hands.

The other prisoners were Apache helicopter pilots shot down the following day.

A clearly elated President Bush, who was informed of the rescue at 7am at his Camp David retreat, said: “It’s a good way to start off the morning to be notified that seven of our fellow Americans will be coming home pretty soon.”

Jessica Lynch, a fellow member of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company also caught in the ambush, was rescued by US special forces on April 1 and spent her first night on US soil at a military hospital on Saturday night.

Matthew Fisher, a reporter with the National Post in Canada travelling with the US Marine’s 3rd Light Armoured Infantry Reconnaisance Division south of Tikrit, said that its orders had been to keep traffic from interfering with the main northward advance.

“We were approached by an Iraqi, I think it was a police officer, who said: ‘I have nothing do do with this, but I know where American prisoners are.’ He took (the Marine unit) to find the prisoners.

“They immediately broke into tears, there was incredible joy. The Marines formed a scrum around them. They said how good it was to speak to Americans again. It was an incredible stroke of luck.”

The Marines were not part of the main US force and had stopped in the area only briefly, Fisher said.

Captain Neil Murphy, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, gave a slightly different version of events. He said that a group of Iraqi soldiers, abandoned by their commanding officers, had approached the Marines with the seven Americans.

“Realising it was the right thing to do, they brought these guys back,” Captain Murphy said.

He added: ”You’ve got to give credit to the humanity of those Iraqi soldiers for returning the PoWs. Given all the atrocities we’ve seen, we feared the worst.”

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