Click to play videoNew Delhi: The Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello, kidnapped in South Afghanistan was released on Friday after being in captivity for almost three weeks.
Although there were reports of him being chained in a dark room and tortured, he was found unharmed.
Torsello wearing a white, freshly laundered salwar-kameez was tired but happy that his ordeal was over.
Thirty-six-year-old, London-based photojournalist, Torsello was taken by armed men from a public bus in the most dangerous part of the country, spoke briefly to journalists at the Italian embassy in Kabul, near the headquarters of the NATO military operation.
Torsello, who was allowed to call an Italian aid agency hospital several times during his captivity, said that he had been held mostly in darkness, a scarf around his head, and that all his photographs had been taken.
“I spent 22 days in an extreme and morally intense situation. I thank God that today when I took off, somebody asked to take off my scarf, as I was blind. I realised that I was on my way back to Lashkar Gah and was in an Emergency vehicle,” he said.
Torsello declined to take other questions, as he looked slightly dazed. However, he said, “I am really, really tired. It's my mind, I am just tired,''
He told aid workers earlier that he had been shackled most of the time and fed mainly potatoes or wet bread in soup with lard- better-than-normal fare in the impoverished south.
''I thought they would kill me,'' the PeaceReporter online news site quoted him as saying before his arrival in Kabul, recounting a night when his captors took him outside instead offeeding him.
Kidnappings, both for criminal and political reasons, have become increasingly common across Afghanistan.
Afghan police said the Taliban held Torsello, but the group denied any involvement, blaming criminals instead.
Five gunmen seized Torsello on October 12 from a bus on the highway from the capital of Helmand province to neighbouring Kandahar province, both Taliban strongholds and major opium
centres.
Torsello did not explain why he was travelling on one of the most dangerous roads in the country and did not say if a ransom had been paid to free him.
Italy has a reputation in Iraq and Afghanistan for paying ransoms, security contractors, analysts and diplomats in both countries say
However, Italy's ambassador to Kabul, Ettore Sequi, denied media reports a ransom had been paid.
The kidnappers in the Taliban stronghold of South Afghanistan had asked Italy to hand over an Afghan who'd converted to Christianity from Islam, in return for his release. Failing that, they wanted Rome to pull its 1,800 soldiers out of the country.
Italian leaders including President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Romano Prodi have expressed relief at his release.
With inputs from agencies.
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