By
The Associated Press
MOSCOW - An American worker for the aid group Doctors Without Borders held hostage in rebel Chechnya for nearly a month has been released unharmed and taken to a Russian military base.
"In terms of health, I feel OK," Kenneth Gluck said in brief remarks broadcast on Russia's ORT television from Khankala, the Chechen city where the Russian military operation is headquartered.
But he also showed signs of being unsettled, saying in Russian, "I'm glad that I'm being held this day," before laughing and correcting himself: "That I'm not being held."
Gluck, a 38-year-old New York City native who first came to Russia in 1990 on a cultural exchange trip, was seized Jan. 9 by masked gunmen who pulled him from his car near the town of Stariye Atagi, in the southern foothills of Chechnya. He and fellow aid workers were on a mission to deliver medical aid. Other workers in the group of cars escaped.
A Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman in Moscow, Kris Torgeson, said she had no immediate details about how Gluck's release took place. Russian officials had said last week that Gluck was being held by fighters under the command of a warlord who goes by the name Yakub.
The ITAR-Tass news agency cited Alexander Zdanovich, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service in Chechnya, as saying Gluck was freed Saturday night in an operation conducted by the service, the main successor group to the KGB.
Zdanovich said no ransom was paid. Other reports said there were no other conditions to the release.
The Interfax news agency, citing the Russian military command in Chechnya, said Gluck had been freed in the region of Stariye Atagi, about 15 miles south of the Chechen capital, Grozny.
Gluck would be kept overnight in Khankala, then flown today to Nazran, the capital of the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, where Doctors Without Borders has an office, ITAR-Tass quoted Zdanovich as saying.
After his seizure, Gluck's relatives said he suffers from severe asthma and expressed concern that his health would quickly deteriorate if he was unable to get medicine.
Hundreds of people, including foreign aid workers, journalists, Russian soldiers and local residents, have been kidnapped by armed bands for ransom in Chechnya. An American missionary, Herbert Gregg, was held hostage for seven months in Chechnya before being released in June 1999.
Gluck's seizure prompted the United Nations, other non-governmental groups working with it and the European Community to suspend operations in Chechnya.
Doctors Without Borders, which won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, supplies free medical help to disaster areas and war zones. It pulled out of the rebel region in December 1997 as kidnapping became widespread, but returned in December 1999.
Russia's government cited the wave of kidnappings in the region as justification to launch a military campaign in Chechnya in 1999. The revival of hostilities also followed a rebel incursion into a neighboring Russian region and apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities that killed about 300 people. Russia blamed rebels for the bombings.
According to the Doctors Without Borders Web site, Gluck was Head of Mission for the agency's North Caucasus program.
He grew up in New York City, the son of school teachers, and studied Russian and Russian literature at Harvard University, graduating in 1990.
After his cultural exchange trip to Russia, on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union, he began working for Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, and other humanitarian aid organizations.
The Doctors group says he worked in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Liberia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Congo-Zaire, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Ethiopia, in addition to Chechnya.
In Tajikistan, he negotiated the country's first agreement with an international relief organization and designed a Food for Work program that organized 15,000 people to rebuild 11,000 homes in six months, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Gluck worked in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996, at the height of the war, and returned last year with Doctors Without Borders. Gluck and his team provided medicine to hospitals and maternity wards throughout Chechnya, and helped displaced Chechens in neighboring republics with food, medical supplies, shelter and counseling.
