US hostage broke through walls of mud shack to escape

Thomas Hamill, an American truck driver who was taken hostage in Iraq, escaped by breaking through the walls of a mud shack and running half a mile to a US convoy.

Mr Hamill, 43, arrived at a US military base in Germany yesterday on his way to Mississippi, having escaped from his captors at the weekend. The US troops who helped him recalled how he approached them, waving his shirt above his head.

"He was yelling, 'I'm an American, I'm an American PoW'," Lieutenant Joseph Merrill, a member of a patrolling Army platoon that happened upon the contract worker north of Baghdad on Sunday morning said. "He said he thought it was the only chance he had, so he made a run for it. He said he didn't know if the guard was there or not." Mr Hamill, who was yesterday reunited with his wife, was captured during an ambush on 9 April, when gunmen attacked a convoy heading out of Baghdad. The former farmer was shot in the arm.

The soldiers from the New York National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 108th Infantry Regiment recalled that Mr Hamill tripped and fell a few times as he ran. Soon the soldiers understood he was shouting in English. One of the guardsmen recognised Mr Hamill from his picture on television and in the military's Stars and Stripes newspaper.

Lt Merrill, who spent less than two hours with the former hostage, said he had been disorientated but in good health.

Mr Hamill said that he had been well-treated by his captors, who gave him a rudimentary medical kit and a box of biscuits. A photograph showed his bed arranged on couch cushions on the dirt floor, with a blanket tossed over them. A bucket served as his lavatory.

When Mr Hamill escorted the platoon back to the empty mud shack, soldiers found an AK-47 rifle, apparently discarded by the fleeing guard.

Troops arrested a pair of Iraqi men farming in an adjacent field, Lt Merrill said. The two Iraqis are being questioned.

Mr Hamill, who works for a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, was among seven American contractors who went missing in the attack in April. The bodies of four have been found, and two others are missing.

Mr Hamill arrived at the US base in Germany hours before Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, stopped over on his way home from a Middle East trip.

The two met for about five minutes in a hospital room. Mr Schwarzenegger said that Mr Hamill had asked to meet him after learning that the governor was visiting wounded troops.