Posted on 04/04/2003 11:47:58 AM PST by bedolido
Iraqi tipster told Marines about Pvt. Jessica Lynch after seeing her captors slap her
By JUAN O. TAMAYO, Knight-Ridder First published: Friday, April 4, 2003
MARINE COMBAT HEADQUARTERS, Iraq -- The Iraqi man who tipped U.S. Marines to the location of American POW Jessica Lynch said Thursday that he did so after he saw her Iraqi captor slap her twice as she lay wounded in a hospital.
"A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being," the tipster, a 32-year-old lawyer whose wife was a nurse at the hospital, said in an interview at Marines' headquarters, where he, his wife and daughter are being treated as heroes and guests of honor.
After he saw Lynch slapped, the lawyer slipped into her room at the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah and told her, "Don't worry."
Then he walked six miles to the nearest U.S. Marines and told them where she was.
He later returned to the hospital, at the request of U.S. commanders, to map the facility and count how many Saddam Hussein loyalists were there.
A U.S. commando force whose name remains secret rescued Lynch early Wednesday local time. She was taken Thursday to Germany for treatment of injuries she suffered when she was captured.
The lawyer, whose first name is Mohammed and who asked that his last name not be published, smiled between every sentence as he recounted in broken but expressive English how he helped the Americans.
He learned English at Basra University.
Wearing Marine hand-me-downs after fleeing with only the clothes on their backs, Mohammed, his wife, Iman, 32, a nurse at Saddam Hospital, and 6-year-old daughter, Abir, seemed surprisingly cheerful for a family on the run.
Grateful Leathernecks showered them with Marine unit patches, a commemorative coin and an American flag on their way to a refugee center near the port of Umm Qsar, where they hope to ride out the war.
"I love America. I like America. Why? I don't know," Mohammed said as he recounted the critical role he played in Lynch's rescue.
Iraqi Fedayeen forces raided his house, he said, taking away all his possessions and even his car, a Russian-made Muscovitch Brazilia 680.
He said a neighbor was shot and her body dragged through the streets just for waving at a U.S. helicopter.
"Very bad people," he said. "There is no kindness in my heart for them."
He got his family out of Nasiriyah on Tuesday night, hours before a task force of U.S. commandos rescued Lynch in a raid so noteworthy that the U.S. Central Command in Qatar called a 4:30 a.m. news conference to announce it.
In Palestine, W.Va., Lynch's father, Gregory Lynch Sr., said she was in great spirits following her first surgery.
He also said doctors told him she had not been shot or stabbed during her ordeal, as had been reported. Lynch said his 19-year-old daughter, who is at a military hospital in Germany, had surgery on her back.
"She didn't have any feeling in her feet," he said outside his home in this West Virginia hamlet. More surgery was scheduled for today on her fractured legs and right arm, he said.
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