RORY CARROLL, the Guardian correspondent kidnapped in Baghdad this week, was released safe and well last night.

The Irish journalist was freed after 36 hours of intensive negotiations after his abduction by an armed gang in the capital’s Shia-dominated Sadr City district on Wednesday.

“He’s fine, absolutely fine. I have just spoken to him. We didn’t get much chance to get many details from him but essentially he told us that he was unharmed and they did not treat him badly,” a Guardian spokeswoman said shortly after his release at around 9pm last night.

“He’s in the Green Zone having a beer and on his way to be debriefed now,” a source in Baghdad said. Joe Carroll, the reporter’s father said on behalf of his wife and daughter: “Kathy, Carina and I are delighted at the news.

“It was a tremendous joy to speak to him immediately after his release and to know he is safe and well and we would just like to thank everybody who has contributed to this happy outcome.”

His release came after extensive efforts by the Iraqi police and the personal intervention of Ahmad Chalabi, the former Deputy Prime Minister. Sources said that there had been no talk of a ransom. Instead all efforts concentrated on “back channels” to persuade his captors to free him.

Mr Carroll, 33, disappeared after he travelled to Sadr City to watch the trial of Saddam Hussein with a Shia victim of the Baathist regime.

He had set up the interview in advance with Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shia cleric whose office arranged for him to meet the family and whose Mahdi army militia controls much of Sadr City.

Last night Mr Carroll described the conditions in which he was kept in a darkened concrete room beneath a family home. “They stripped me of all my own clothes and dressed me in old clothes,” he said. “They allowed me out twice for food.”

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