Journalists say they were taken illegally into Syria

Beirut: Two American journalists who disappeared earlier this month during a trip across the Middle East said they were abducted by a taxi driver and taken illegally across the Lebanese border into Syria, where they were caught by authorities, locked up and interrogated for a week, according to a report published on Friday.

Taylor Luck and Holli Chmela, two US citizens and reporters for the English-language Jordan Times, were released from Syrian custody on Thursday night and handed over to American officials before heading home to the Jordanian capital, Amman.

In the front-page account of their ordeal published by their paper on Friday, Chmela, 27, and Luck, 23, denied Syrian accusations that they paid a smuggler to get them across the border.

They said they had intended to cross the Syrian border legally, but were duped by a taxi driver and another accomplice into using an illegal road to cross the frontier, which has been a subject of international concern over fears it is being used to smuggle weapons and militants.

The disappearance, announced October 8, raised fears of a return to the kidnapping of Westerners, a practice that was widespread in Lebanon during its civil war, though questions remain about the two journalists' adventure.

Lebanese breathed a sigh of relief that the two were not victims of the kind of politically motivated abductions that spurred Westerners to flee the country during the 1970s and 1980s.

"The suspicions that some security officials had that the two might have been taken to a Palestinian camp or attacked by fundamentalists because of their nationality was proven wrong," wrote the daily Al Akhbar.

Syrian officials told a Lebanese newspaper that the two paid at least $120 to get across the border. The daily As Safir reported that the pair confessed to hiring a smuggler to get them across the border along a smuggling route in order to gather material for an article about "the border and smuggling".

The account jibes with statements by Syrian authorities in recent days.

But the two told the Jordan Times that they were tricked into crossing the border on October 1 by a driver who said he was authorised to make such trips.

They had a feeling things were going badly when the driver "went off the main road", Luck told his newspaper.