BAGHDAD — The U.S. military on Wednesday released a freelance Iraqi journalist who had been held without charge for 17 months after telling him more than a year ago that his detention had been “a mistake,” the journalist said.
Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance cameraman and photographer for the London-based Reuters news agency, said in a telephone interview that his U.S. interrogators had initially accused him of disseminating material relating to insurgent attacks. He had been seized in an overnight raid from his home south of Baghdad in September 2008.
Jassam denied the charge and, after several months, the military told him “that I was captured by mistake,” he said. An Iraqi court ordered him released for lack of evidence in November 2008.
The U.S. military rebutted Jassam’s claim.
“Ibrahim Jassam’s detention was not a mistake,” said Lt. Col Patricia Johnson, spokeswoman for the U.S. military’s detainee operations. “He was detained as a security threat in September 2008 as the result of activity with an insurgent organization. . . . There was intelligence evidence against him.”
The evidence can’t be disclosed because it remains classified, she added.
Jassam was released, she said, under the terms of a security agreement signed with Iraq that paves the way for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The U.S. military has promised to hand over all detainees to the Iraqi government by August 2010.
Jassam is the last of several Iraqi journalists to be detained and eventually freed by the U.S. military in the course of the 7-year-old war. None has been charged.
