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After Six Weeks, Four Journalists Released In Libya

"Four foreign journalists held by the Libyan government for six weeks were released Wednesday and moved to a Tripoli hotel," The Associated Press reports. "Clare Morgana Gillis, an American, said she and her colleagues — American James Foley, Spaniard Manuel Varela and Briton Nigel Chandler — were in good health."

From Benghazi, NPR's Martin Kaste says that the journalists "were all delivered to a hotel that houses the foreign press corps in Tripoli."

A spokesman for the Gadhafi regime, Martin reports, "says the Libyan army couldn't be sure the journalists weren't really foreign agents, sent to the war zone to help the rebels." And that spokesman apologized "if anyone was mistreated."

Gillis is a freelancer who has reported for The Atlantic and USA Today. Foley has been writing for GlobalPost.

Earlier today, as we reported, al-Jazeera English correspondent Dorothy Parvaz surfaced after 19 days of detention — first in Syria and then, after two days, in Iran (she is a U.S., Canadian and Iranian citizen).

She said on al-Jazeera today that while being held in Syria:

"I was handcuffed repeatedly, blindfolded, taken to a courtyard and just left to hear these men being beaten.They all sounded very young, they all sounded to be in their late teens or early twenties. So it was an overall terrifying experience."

In Iran, Parvaz said, "it was relatively fair. The people there treated me with respect."

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Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.