Canadian journalist Mellissa Fung said that no Taliban prisoners were exchanged for her release, but said some relatives of her capturers were set free by Afghan officials in order to secure her freedom.
"I now understand that Afghan intelligence had sort of fingered the family of the ringleader of this gang, and had arrested a whole bunch of them and it was a prisoner exchange," Fung, a 35-year-old CBC reporter, said in an interview from an undisclosed location.
"They agreed to release the family if the group would release me, and that's what ended up happening."
Fung made it clear that the prisoners released were directly linked to her kidnapping.
"That was directly related to, then, the people that took you, as opposed to other prisoners?" her interviewer asks.
"There were never any other prisoners," she replied.
Fung was freed last Saturday after nearly four weeks of captivity in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said no ransom was paid, and there was rampant media speculation on how her release was secured.
Both Harper and Ron Hoffman, Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan, have stated that no "Taliban prisoners" or "political prisoners" were released.
"There have been continued reports about ransoms or money being paid; that was not done in this case," Harper said earlier this week.
"Likewise, there's been no release or exchange of political prisoners."
International media kept Fung's capture secret so as not to compromise the negotiations for her release. CBC publisher John Cruickshank said that the network had requested the media blackout so negotiators could work for her release without mounting public pressure.
Dying not an option: Fung
Fung told herself that dying was "not an option" during her nearly month-long imprisonment by Afghan gunmen, and faked an illness to accelerate negotiations for her release.
Fung was kidnapped on Oct 12 after speaking to refugees at a camp in the slums of Kabul. She was leaving with her Afghan fixer when two young men with "big guns" drove up in a car and blocked their path.
"One of them grabbed me, the other pointed a gun at our fixer," she said in the interview, which was held at an undisclosed location. "There was a bit of a struggle and I think I hit one. He stabbed me in the shoulder. The next thing I knew, I was in their car, on the floor of the back seat."
Speaking in English, one of the men told her, "We won't kill you."
Her kidnappers then drove her to the far outskirts of the city. They forced her to trek through the rocky, mountainous region for roughly three hours.
"I was bleeding. I didn't know where I was. I thought maybe I could run, but they had guns," she said.
She was only given one opportunity to use a cellphone, and called a CTV colleague for help.
The kidnappers then led her to a tiny cave in a mountain, with two vents to let air in -- a tiny hole where she would spend much of her time for the next four weeks.
"The first thing that went through my mind was, 'Nobody is ever going to find me here. I'm in a hole in the middle of nowhere where I don't even know where I am,'" she said. "But what can you do at that point?"
Her captors blindfolded her and chained her to a wall inside the cave. They gave her biscuits for food and pomegranate juice.
Fung put pressure on her kidnappers to release her by faking an illness, telling them she would get "very sick" if they didn't act quickly to negotiate her freedom.
One of the two men, who gave his name as Khaled, appeared to be in charge of the abduction. Initially, the men identified themselves as Taliban. Khaled later said his family ran a kidnapping business and negotiations went through his father in Pakistan.
Sometime around the third week of her captivity, Fung pretended she was sick, to pressure Khaled into asking for a quick resolution in the negotiations.
"(Khaled) became very very concerned," she said. "He called doctors to ask what it could possibly be, brought medicine for me. I didn't know what it was. I didn't take it. It looked expired."
Hoffman said Wednesday that Afghan troops had been getting closer to Fung's location, putting pressure on her captors to work out a deal.
They were "getting increasingly close to identifying and locating those who had abducted her, and that allowed them to negotiate her release," he said.
