Blindfolded and tied up for five months in cellar

PARIS - In an extraordinarily courageous and humorous performance, French journalist Florence Aubenas spoke for nearly two hours yesterday about how she survived five months blindfolded and tied up in a small, dark cellar in Iraq.

The 44-year-old, spirited and composed after her ordeal, made one bombshell revelation and generated a mystery.

Aubenas, kidnapped near Baghdad in January and released at the weekend, deepened the controversy surrounding a maverick, pro-Saddam French MP, Didier Julia.

She told a packed press conference at the offices of her newspaper, Liberation, that her chief hostage-taker claimed to have twice spoken on the telephone to Julia last March.

"He said that it was very brief because Julia speaks English very badly," Aubenas said, provoking laughter among her colleagues.

Julia, a member of President Jacques Chirac's UMP Party, has denied that he interfered in the official attempts to free Aubenas.

The other mystery sparked by Aubenas concerned two Romanian journalists, freed in Iraq last month. They claimed at the weekend that they had spent part of their captivity, from April, with Aubenas and her guide, Hussein Hanoun.

Yesterday, despite repeated questioning, Aubenas said she could not speak about the Romanians. She hinted this was to do with the need to protect French intelligence sources in Iraq.

"However many times you ask, I will say that I spent my captivity with Hussein," she said. "That's all."

Aubenas refused to accept she had been especially courageous. She paid tribute to her family, her colleagues at Liberation and others who had organised events to keep her name before the public.

"If you are a hostage, you are just there, that's all. There is nothing you can do. For those at home, to keep up their hopes and keep up the pressure, that takes real courage."

Aubenas said she had spent the whole of her five months in a 4m by 2m cellar. She was blindfolded and tied hand and foot. She was allowed to go to the toilet twice a day and to shower once a month.

She was beaten if she spoke to the other prisoner in her cell. She did not know he was Hussein, her guide, until a few days before her release.

"To be a hostage is long in the living but short in the telling," Aubenas said. "I passed the time by counting things. Counting the seconds, the minutes, the words spoken to me, the steps to the toilet."

She also described a series of surreal conversations with the head hostage-taker, a man called, in English, "ze boss", or in Arabic, "Hadji". There was never any mention of money or a ransom, she said.

Nonetheless, "ze boss" seemed anxious to contact the French Government but did not know how.

"He asked me, 'Have you got Chirac's email?', and then, 'Is there an opposition party in France? Have they got an internet site?"'

When Aubenas proved unable to answer these or other questions, he said, "You are a useless hostage."

Hadji - who said he was a Sunni freedom fighter resisting American occupation - then had the idea to contact Julia. He filmed Aubenas for a video, which was released in March, appealing to Julia to help her.

Some days later, Hadji was delighted and said he had spoken to the French MP twice on the telephone.

Asked if she would go back to Iraq, Aubenas paused.

"I don't know.

"Maybe in 10 years. Imagine if I was to agree to go back now. Imagine ringing up and saying, 'Mum, guess what . . '."

- INDEPENDENT