Freed British hostage Norman Kember returned home Saturday after four months in captivity in Iraq and thanked the soldiers who saved him and two other peace activists.
Kember, 74, arrived on a commercial flight from Kuwait and was reunited with his wife, Pat, in a terminal in Heathrow Airport. He waved to the waiting TV cameras.
A joint U.S.-British military operation freed Kember and Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, on Thursday. They were rescued without violence from a house west of Baghdad.
"I do not believe that a lasting peace is achieved by armed force, but I pay tribute to their courage and thank those who played a part in my rescue," Kember said in a statement he read to journalists while smiling and holding his wife's hand.
After their rescue, the three members of the Christian Peacemakers Teams group learned that a fellow hostage, 54-year-old American Tom Fox, had been killed by the hostage-takers weeks earlier.
Kember declined to answer questions about his ordeal and said the world's focus should be on the needs of the Iraqi people.
Some British media were critical of what they viewed as an apparent lack of a formal thank you from the peace activists for the efforts to rescue them. But Kember's supporters maintained that thanks was expressed quickly.
"We are thankful to all the people who gave of themselves sacrificially to free Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom over the last four months, and those supporters who prayed and wept for our brothers in captivity, for their loved ones and for us, their co-workers," Christian Peacemaker Teams said Thursday in a statement.
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the rescue was launched three hours after a detainee captured the night before told American forces where the hostages were.
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