A German woman who was kidnapped in Syria last year has been released alongside the baby she gave birth to in captivity.

The German foreign ministry on Wednesday night confirmed the woman and her child were well and being looked after by the federal criminal police officers at the country’s embassy in Ankara, Turkey.

News magazine Focus identified the woman as journalist Janina Findeisen, who travelled to Syria in October 2015 while she was six months pregnant.

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There were reports Findeisen, a freelance reporter on modern jihadism for Süddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcaster NDR, might have been deliberately lured into a trap by a Syria-based German national who had encouraged her to travel to the war-torn country for exclusive information on German jihadis.

In an email sent to relatives, the kidnappers – who said they were a faction of al-Qaida’s former affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra – asked for €5m (£4.3m) in ransom money for Findeisen, who was 27 at the time she was taken into captivity. The German government’s policy is not to pay ransoms for hostages.

The al-Nusra Front, which recently renamed itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, has denied that it was behind the kidnapping, and in a series of tweets said it had in fact freed Findeisen and her child from another “armed group” which was holding her. It did not name the group or say when Findeisen had been rescued.

Most German media had not reported on the kidnapping at the time in order not to endanger Findeisen’s life, following a request by the German foreign ministry.



Christian Mihr, director of Reporters Without Borders in Germany, said in a statement his organisation was happy the kidnapping had come to an end. “This case once again makes clear what unforeseeable dangers journalists are constantly exposed to in the Syrian civil war,” he said.

Mihr thanked German authorities for managing to “avoid that this kidnapping ended in an execution like that of James Foley and other journalists”. He said: “It was also important that German media almost unanimously agreed not to exploit the case for sensationalist reporting in order to help protect their colleague.”