Free Republic

KABUL -- An Italian aid worker held hostage for more than three weeks in Afghanistan has been released, the Interior Ministry said Thursday. . . .

Gianfranco Fini, the Italian Foreign Minister, increased a diplomatic row with the United States today by demanding that Washington identify and punish those responsible for the shooting of Rome’s top intelligence agent in Iraq. Signor Fini dismissed the American version that a lack of communication was responsible for the death of Nicola Calipari, who died in a hail of gunfire from US troops as he escorted a freed Italian hostage to Baghdad airport on Friday. Signor Calipari had made "all the necessary contacts" with US authorities in Baghdad, the minister said. In his account to parliament of the shooting, which...

ROME - U.S. forces in Iraq were only partially informed about last week's Italian intelligence mission to release a hostage, which ended with a shooting on the road to Baghdad airport and the death of secret service agent Nicola Calipari, Italian newspapers said Friday. While U.S authorities were informed of the presence of Calipari and a colleague, they did not know that the mission was aimed at freeing Giuliana Sgrena, a journalist who had been kidnapped in Baghdad on Feb. 4, Italian dailies La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera reported. Calipari's killing by American forces on March 4 shocked Italy...

Over the weekend, I caught CNN removing a damning quote from a story about Italian Communist journalist Guiliana Sgrena, recently released from some form of captivity in Iraq for a reported $6 million ransom, about why she was in Iraq in the first place. She was there, in her own words, to agitate against America and the war-- Sgrena said she "risked everything" to challenge "the Italian government, who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq, and the Americans," who she said don't want the public to see "what really became of that country with the war, and notwithstanding that which...

I'm still in the dark. Friday was the most dramatic day of my life. I had been in captivity for many days. I had just spoken with my captors. It had been days they were telling me I would be released. I was living in waiting for this moment. They were speaking about things that only later I would have understood the importance of. They were speaking about problems "related to transfers." I learned to understand what was going on by the behavior of my two guards, the two guards that had me under custody every day. One in particular...

ROME, March 4 -- U.S. troops fired on a vehicle carrying an Italian journalist to freedom after a month in captivity Friday, wounding her and at least one other person and killing an Italian intelligence agent who had helped to arrange her release. [...] In Baghdad, the U.S. military said in a statement that the car was fired upon shortly before 9 p.m. local time as it was "approaching a coalition checkpoint in western Baghdad at a high rate of speed." The statement said that "the people at the checkpoint attempted to warn the driver to stop by using hand...