KARBALA, Iraq, Aug 17 (AFP) - A Jordanian car dealer who was kidnapped in Iraq eight days ago was rescued overnight by Iraqi police outside the central holy city of Karbala, he said Tuesday.
"Five people kidnapped me in Baghdad eight days ago and took me to this village. They asked me to call my family and ask for 170,000 dollars ransom," Samer Tumallah Hussein Tumallah, 35, told AFP.
Karbala governor Saad Sfuq said Iraqi police were tipped off that kidnappers were holding the Jordanian in the village of Um-Royah, just east of this city.
Two of his captors were arrested, while the other three fled during the police raid, before Hussein was brought to a police station in Karbala.
"I was so surprised to have been released, but thank God it happened," he said. "I was very well treated, they just needed the money".
A Jordanian foreign ministry spokesman in Amman said they first heard of his capture earlier Tuesday from Tumallah's family in Jordan.
"His relatives said they received a call from Karbala to say that Samer Tumallah Hussein Tumallah had been released in Iraq. We had never heard of him being abducted before today," Ali Ayed told AFP.
The foreign ministry informed the Jordanian embassy in Amman of the latest development and was following up on it, he added.
Tumallah's mother told AFP her son, a father of two, travelled to Iraq two weeks ago without informing his family.
"He was working as an agent for his cousin, a car dealer in Germany, and clients in Karbala although he is an employee at the Arab Bank in Amman," Jaziya Tumallah said in a telephone interview.
"Had I known he was going to Iraq I would have stopped him," she said.
"This morning the governor of Karbala telephoned me that he had been released and that he would be sent to the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad ahead of his return home," she said.
Another Jordanian businessman, Jamal Sadek al-Salaymeh, who was taken from his Baghdad home on August 9, was freed within days.
It was not clear if a 250,000-dollar ransom demand was met for Salaymeh, who worked for an Iraqi firm selling Korean tyres.