An Egyptian truck driver freed after a two-week ordeal as a hostage in Iraq said the first day was hard but then he was well looked after by his Islamist kidnappers who moved him, bound and blindfolded, several times during his captivity.
"At the start they threatened me, they accused me of working with the Americans, but afterwards they treated me very well," said Sayed Mohammed Sayed al-Garbawi, ecstatic after his release on Monday.
"I convinced them I was innocent," said the bearded Garbawi, who was seized by gunmen in early July as he was driving a fuel truck from Saudi Arabia into Iraq.
Iraq has been hit by a spate of kidnappings of foreigners by Islamic militants opposed to the new government and hoping to derail the US-led reconstruction efforts.
Some have been killed - mostly by decapitation - some released and others are still missing.
Another hostage truck driver from the Philippines was reportedly freed on Tuesday after his government pulled out the last of its troops from Iraq as demanded by the kidnappers.
Garbawi, 42 and father of three boys and a girl, said he was held by about five or six kidnappers armed with Kalashnikov rifles who described themselves as members of an Islamic group calling itself the Iraqi Patriotic Resistance.
Egyptian officials refused to say whether a ransom was paid to secure Garbawi's release after his Saudi employer had announced Friday that it would end all its activities in Iraq as demanded by the kidnappers.
Initially the militant group holding Garbawi had demanded a ransom of one million dollars but his employer offered 15,000 dollars instead.
Garbawi said he was driving his fuel-laden truck in a 50-vehicle convoy from Saudi Arabia to Iraq that was being monitored by the Iraqi police, when the assailants shot out his tyres and seized him.
"They were Islamists but they didn't ask me anything in particular. They spoke to me a lot but always hid their faces," he said. "They changed the place where they held me a number of times, on each occasion blindfolding me and tying my hands behind my back," he said.
Garbawi recalled being photographed and filmed by his captors.
Arab satellite television station Al-Jazeera broadcast video footage on July 7 showing him among four masked men who said they kidnapped him because he was working for US forces in Iraq.
His abduction was actually claimed by a group calling itself the Khaled bin Al-Walid Brigade, affiliated to the Iraq Islamic Army.
The same group had also claimed it was holding the Filipino truck driver and threatened to behead him unless Manila withdrew its troops from Iraq by July 20, one month earlier than scheduled.
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