BERLIN, May 3 (UPI) -- Exactly 100 days after they were abducted in Iraq, two German engineers have returned home.
They landed on a Berlin airport shortly after 2 p.m. on Wednesday, according to German public television.
"I am happy to be back home," Rene Braeunlich told reporters after he stepped out of the plane. His colleague Thomas Nitzschke added: "We want to thank everyone who had a part in our release."
Both men appeared exhausted after their Tuesday release and did not speak much, adding they had repeatedly feared for their lives in captivity.
Braeunlich and Nitzschke, two engineers from the eastern German city of Leipzig, were taken at gunpoint from their workplace by unidentified men on Jan. 24, in the Sunni triangle in Iraq. Employed by German engineering firm Cryotec, they had joined a work crew at an Iraqi oil plant in the industrial town of Baiji.
The men were released because of "a diverse help from all our friends in Iraq... including the Americans," Gernot Erler, deputy foreign minister, Wednesday morning told public broadcaster ARD, adding that all information pointed to a criminally motivated abduction.
Alaa Al-Hashimy, Iraq's ambassador to Germany, told ARD he assumed Berlin paid a "large amount of money" to free the men.
Erler did not want to comment on ransom payments, arguing such speculations would fuel copy-cat crimes.
In Leipzig, people celebrated outside the city's Nikolai Church, where over the past 14 weeks they had gathered no less than 27 times to pray for the men's release.
