OTTAWA, Sept 13 (AFP) - Kidnappers have released a Canadian journalist abducted last week and threatened with beheading has been freed, the foreign ministry said Monday.
Scott Taylor, a warfare specialist and editor of the magazine Esprit de Corps, published by the defense ministry, told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper he was kidnapped by a Turkmen Shiite group in the town of Tall Afar, 450 kilometers (280 miles) north of Baghdad.
Taylor said he was later handed over to another group of non-Arabs linked to Al-Qaeda and taken to Mosul, where he was freed on the weekend without explanation after being beaten and threatened with death.
"Six times in those five days I was convinced I was going to die right there on the spot," he told the newspaper from a town in southeastern Turkey near the Iraq border.
"I can barely walk from the beatings I got, but it was the mental torture of thinking six times you're about to die that's tough," he said.
"Turkish intelligence people say I'm the only Westerner ever released by the Al-Qaeda group and they can't understand why," he told the daily.
In Ottawa, the foreign affairs ministry said little about the story. A spokesman said Taylor was received late Monday at the Canadian embassy in Ankara. "I will not tell you anything more," the spokesman, Reynald Doiron, told AFP.