A group of at least 40 students kidnapped by gunmen today near the northern city of Mosul have been freed by Iraqi security forces, police said.
"The kidnapped students have been freed by the Iraqi army and police," said Brigadier-General Khalid Abdul-Sattar, security spokesman in Iraq's Nineveh province, where Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, lies.
Earlier, he said 42 male university students had been seized, one of the biggest mass abductions since the US-led invasion in 2003. He later said the total number of students captured had been 40.
The gunmen had set up a fake checkpoint and stopped two buses in the village of al-Jirin full of students returning to classes after a weekend break. One of the buses escaped, police said, but male students from the other bus were loaded onto trucks and taken away.
Abdul-Sattar gave no details of the operation to free the students.
The kidnapping highlighted the continued violence in the north of the country after much focus on tensions in the largely Shia south, where gunmen loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed with government troops late last month.
No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but suspicion will fall on Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda, which has regrouped in northern provinces after being pushed out of western Anbar province and Baghdad by a series of military offensives.