Briton held by Taliban says West wanted her dead

    By Mike Collett-White 
    LONDON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - It could be a chapter from 
"Scoop", novelist Evelyn Waugh's famous spoof in which a foreign 
correspondent gets into a tangle in a far-flung war. 
    Except British journalist Yvonne Ridley -- held captive in 
Afghanistan as U.S. bombs rained down -- insists her story of 
subterfuge and spies is real and the villain was the West rather 
than the Taliban who held her on suspicion of espionage. 
    Ridley, of the Sunday Express, sneaked into Taliban-held 
territory illegally in late September hidden under a traditional 
Afghan woman's head-to-toe burqa veil, but was caught as she 
journeyed back to Pakistan. She was later released. 
    The 43-year-old, who is launching a book on her 10-day 
ordeal, accused Western intelligence services on Wednesday of 
trying to have her executed during her capture to boost public 
support for the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan. 
    "I suppose that if I had been publicly executed for being a 
spy, that would have been a huge propaganda tool for the West to 
be used as a stick to beat anti-war people," she told Reuters. 
    The allegations, which appear in the final chapter of "In 
the Hands of the Taliban", were based on what Ridley said were 
false documents she had seen suggesting she was a spy. 
    She had no copies, but said the documents, and evidence that 
her apartment in London had been broken into during her 
assignment abroad, all pointed to foul play. 
    "I really don't know who tried to set me up. Was it the CIA, 
British intelligence, Mossad, a combination, or someone else?" 
     
    RELIEF AT RELEASE 
    Ironically, Ridley believes that the attempt to have her 
killed may have saved her life. 
    "They (the Taliban) felt sorry for me. Someone had tried to 
convince them I was a spy, and it was a very clumsy attempt." 
    She said the documents, including bank statements and 
details of a house sale, had apparently found their way into 
Taliban hands. They exaggerated her income, which she said 
reinforced suspicions that she was getting money from an 
intelligence service. 
    She added that copies of her ex-husband's Israeli passport, 
and an alleged code number linking him to Israel's Mossad secret 
service, were also supplied, as was a photograph of her with her 
husband and daughter purporting to have been taken in Iran. 
    "This picture was actually taken in Stratford-upon-Avon (in 
England), but during Taliban questioning they said I had done 
this kind of thing before and had been to Iran under cover," she 
said. 
    Ridley first began to suspect foul play when she heard that 
the Qatari television network al-Jazeera, which had good access 
to the Taliban, had run two reports, based on the documents, 
suggesting that she had been "used" by intelligence agencies. 
    She was shown copies of some of the paperwork by the 
network's London-based journalist, Nacer Bedri. 
    "We ran reports with some of the documents which we believed 
were genuine," Bedri told Reuters. "I was e-mailed the 
documents, and have shown some of them to Yvonne." 
    Ridley was widely vilified in the British press after her 
release from captivity, with her clandestine mission dismissed 
as "sheer folly" and "heroic idiocy". 
    The single mother, who went on hunger strike and kept a 
secret diary while in captivity, has few regrets. 
    "I regret getting on the donkey (on which her cover was 
blown) but I do not regret the whole thing," she said. 
 ((London newsroom, +44 207 542 7950, fax +44 207 542 7921)) 
 
12 DEC 2001 15:44:30
Briton held by Taliban says West wanted her dead

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