MOSCOW, Dec. 28 (JTA) Free after six months in captivity in Chechnya, Laura Lichtman sounds happy but her relatives say she looks swollen and sick.
Lichtman, 18, an Israeli citizen born in Russia, was freed by her Chechen kidnappers Saturday and brought to her relatives in the city of Nalchik in the Caucasus Mountains.
“Three days before the release they brought me from the village where I had been held, to some canyon in the mountains. They kept me there in a tent; then they brought me to some village, where an unknown man picked me and brought me to Nalchik,” she told JTA.
Officials connected to a “special police unit” operating in the Caucasus region that obtained her release wouldn’t disclose any details of her case, but according to officials involved in the operation, her release was part of an exchange deal.
Lichtman, according to speculation, was either exchanged for a Chechen mobster who had been detained in Russia, or a Chechen military commander, disturbed by the imminent advance of Russian troops, wanted to get “security guarantees” by helping to free an important hostage.
An estimated 300 to 350 non-Chechen hostages, including several Israelis, are being held in Chechnya, where Russian troops are engaged in heavy fighting with rebel Chechen fighters.
Top government officials knew of Lichtman’s case. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had discussed the case in August when he met in Moscow with then-Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, who promised to look into the case.
Lichtman was scheduled to arrive back in Israel on Tuesday.
Lichtman came to Nalchik in July to spend a month with her grandmother. Her ordeal began when she was picked up in a car by someone named Bulat, a boyfriend of one of her former classmates.
“He simply told me his car was not OK, and he needed somebody’s help somewhere out of the city. We stopped in a small village near the city, Bulat got out of the car, and two unknown men got into the car.”
Demands for ransoms exceeding $1 million followed, as well as threats. At one point, investigators believed she had been killed.
“The hardest thing was the loneliness,” Lichtman said in the interview. “They kept me in a locked room with closed shutters. It was dark all the time. They treated me more or less well, no violence, on condition that I wouldn’t try to escape. But nobody talked to me, and I knew nothing about the outside world.”
