AKI reports three men suspected of having ties to those who took reporter Jill Carroll have been detained in Baghdad.

The Iraqi authorities have arrested three people in Baghdad suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of American freelance journalist Jill Carroll. An interior ministry statement said the arrests were made during a raid by the security forces in the Adel neighbourhood where Carroll was seized. The journalist, working for the US daily Christian Science Monitor, was pulled from her car on 7 January and her interpreter was killed. She had been due that day to interview Adnan al-Dulaimi, the leader of the Iraqi Consensus Front movement, a Sunni political grouping.

Hopefully this arrest will shed some light into Carroll’s whereabouts. The deadline given for the Iraqi government to bow to the kidnappers demands was this past Sunday. An unknown group said they would execute Carroll if all female prisoners were not released from Iraqi jails.