Security services unable to reconstruct what happened to US captain in Kyrgyzstan AIA already reported about the case of Jill Metzger , a US Air Force captain who was presumed kidnapped on September 5 in Kyrgyzstan before turning up three days later. More questions than answers continue to surround the case, online agency Eurasia.net writes today. Metzger, who was reportedly in the final days of a deployment at the US air base at Manas outside the Kyrgyz capital, vanished after last being seen at Bishkek’s Central Department Store in the late afternoon on September 5. Three days later, she reappeared in Kant, a Bishkek suburb that also happens to be the home of a Russian military facility. While missing, Metzger’s long blonde hair had been cut short and dyed black, according to local reports. Metzger, according to witnesses, seemed dazed when she reappeared, but showed no visible signs of physical abuse; she is “undergoing follow-up medical evaluations and debriefings” at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany, according to a US Air Force statement. Beyond this, what happened to Metzger remains a mystery, Eurasia.net says. Local news accounts, citing security services investigators, say that Metzger claimed that she had been kidnapped, but in the moments immediately after she resurfaced, she reportedly provided Kyrgyz police with contradictory information about her experience. Several Kyrgyz media outlets said surveillance video at the department store showed Metzger leaving alone. The 24.kg news agency, citing a security forces source, reported that a woman matching Metzger’s description speaking in Russian approached “the operator of a telephone outlet” in Bishkek and a private taxi driver admitted giving a “foreign woman” a lift on September 5 around the time of Metzger’s disappearance. Security services have been unable to reconstruct what happened after this point until her reappearance. The 24.kg report of a foreign woman speaking in Russian contradicts an account provided by the couple in Kant who first encountered Metzger on September 8. The Bely Parakhod newspaper quoted a woman, identified as Svetlana Ishchenko, as saying that when Metzger mysteriously appeared at her front door, the American seemed to be in a state of shock and could not speak a word of Russian.
