ROME, 6 March 2005 — Wrapped in a blanket and looking haggard, freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena returned to Italy from Iraq yesterday hours after American troops fired on the car she was in, wounding her and killing an Italian intelligence officer who apparently tried to protect her.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was among the dignitaries at Rome’s Ciampino Airport to welcome the journalist after her weeks in the hands of her captors and the final ordeal of the checkpoint shooting en route to Baghdad’s airport.
Sgrena, 56, was helped off the aircraft and put into an ambulance bound for a military clinic for an operation on her collarbone.
From the hospital, Sgrena recounted her ordeal. “We thought the danger was over after my rescue,” she told Rai News 24 television by telephone. “And instead suddenly there was this shooting, we were hit by a spray of fire. I was talking to Nicola... when he leaned over me, probably to defend me, and then he slumped over. That was a truly terrible thing.” Calipari is to be awarded a posthumous medal of valor, officials said.
The U.S. military said the car Sgrena was riding in after her release was speeding as it approached a coalition checkpoint in western Baghdad on its way to the airport. It said soldiers shot into the engine block only after trying to warn the driver to stop by “hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and firing warning shots.”
US President George W. Bush called Berlusconi and expressed his regret in a five-minute conversation, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said. Berlusconi summoned the US ambassador to Rome, Mel Sembler.
“The United States will continue to provide all necessary assistance,” Sembler said in a statement, expressing condolences to Calipari’s family and wishing the wounded a quick recovery.
