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10/02/2004:

"Freed Italian Says Rebel War Is Justified"

by Ian Fisher
ROME, Oct. 1 - One of the two Italian aid workers freed after three weeks in captivity in Iraq said the fight against American troops and their allies there was not terrorism but legitimate resistance to occupation.

"I distinguish between terrorism and resistance," the woman, Simona Torretta, told an Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, in an interview published Friday. "The guerrilla war is justified, but I am against the kidnapping of civilians."

Ms. Torretta and Simona Pari, both 29, were welcomed home on Tuesday with great fanfare by a nation distraught at their kidnapping and horrified that even aid workers opposed to the war could be targets for kidnapping.

In the interview, Ms. Torretta said she believed that she and her colleague were released because they were able to convince their captors that they were opposed to the war and that they helped ordinary Iraqis.

She added, "This was a very religious and very political group, and at the end it was convinced that we were not enemies."

Ms. Torretta said she did not know anything about reports, denied by the government here though widespread in the Italian news media, that $1 million had been paid to the kidnappers. "If a ransom was paid, I am very sorry," she said. "But I know nothing about it."

Ms. Torretta, who had worked in Iraq since 1997, repeated her call for Italy to pull its 3,000 troops from Iraq, and said that neither the election called for January nor the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was legitimate. Dr. Allawi's government, she said, is "a puppet in the hands of the Americans."

Since their release, both the women have said they wanted to return to Iraq. In the interview, Ms. Torretta said she would not do so anytime soon. "I have to wait until the end of the American occupation," she said.

NY Times