"Richard Engel of NBC Is Released in Syria," kidnapping

Engel and his crew of 3 were kidnapped inside Syria, no contact with NBC, no ransom demands, and "rescued" unharmed after a firefight when their kidnappers ran into a rebel checkpoint.  

From the N.Y. Times: "Mr. Engel covertly entered Syria several times this year to report on the insurgency that is fighting President Bashar al-Assad there. He was last seen on television last Thursday in a taped report from Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, where he reported that "the Syrian regime appears to be cracking, but the rebels remain outgunned." He and his crew members had apparently moved to a safer location outside the country to transmit their report (two days earlier he had reported live on the "Today" show from Turkey, having just come back from Aleppo) because they were detained on Thursday when they were trying to move back into Syria.

Mr. Engel and the crew members, whose names were not released by NBC, were blindfolded by the kidnappers and "tossed into the back of a truck," NBC’s Web site said. From that point on, NBC had no contact with Mr. Engel or the crew. The network’s Web sitesaid there was "no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing,"

The site said the crew members were being moved to a new location on Monday night "when their captors ran into a checkpoint manned by members of the Ahrar al-Sham brigade, a Syrian rebel group. There was a confrontation and a firefight ensued. Two of the captors were killed, while an unknown number of others escaped." The rebels helped escort the crew to the Syrian border.

NBC attempted to keep the crew’s disappearance a secret for several days while it sought to ascertain their whereabouts. Its television competitors and many other major news organizations, including The New York Times, refrained from reporting on the situation, in part out of fears that any reporting could further endanger the crew. A similar arrangement, sometimes called a blackout, was reached after a reporter for The Times, David Rohde, was kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2008. Mr. Rohde and a local reporter escaped after seven months in captivity."  [Even the header for this story in the on-line edition of the Times is in small type with other items in the middle of the first page.]

Syria is said by the Committee to Protect Journalists to be "the world’s most dangerous place for the press."