Beheading Victim 'Loved Adventure and Risk'

At 10 a.m. the next day, Mahmoud said, Berg left the hotel, saying he was going to visit friends in the eastern part of the city. He never returned. In his room, the staff later found an Arabic-English dictionary and a book in Persian.

Around 9 p.m., Berg was detained near the hotel by Iraqi police. "He seemed confused, and he was taken in by the police patrol," said 1st Lt. Sayel Abdullah, the officer in charge of the Guzlani district.

The police, who placed Berg in the central jail in Mosul, notified a local U.S. military police commander. "We were informed of this man being picked up by the Iraqi police, so we made sure that he got food to eat and a cot to sleep on," Army Lt. Col. Joseph Piek, a military spokesman in Mosul, said Thursday.

The military informed the FBI, which sent agents to interview Berg on March 25 and 26. The substance of the interviews is still not clear, but after a third interview about a week later, the FBI determined that he was not suspicious.

In the meantime, Berg's parents had prepared a petition for the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, arguing that the U.S. military had illegally detained their son despite an FBI recommendation that he be released. They contended that his detention prevented his planned return to the United States on March 30.

The petition was filed April 5, and Berg was freed the next day. It is not known why he was held for 13 days.

Berg returned to Baghdad and the Al-Fanar, a hotel popular among foreigners, including freelance journalists and independent businessmen. He had stayed at the eight-story hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris River, the night before he left for Mosul.

He told one guest, Hugo Infante, a Chilean journalist, that he was arrested only because he had an Israeli stamp in his passport. Berg was Jewish.

Infante was impressed by Berg's cheerfulness. "He never said a bad word about the country," he said. "He loved the Iraqi people."

Andrew Robert Duke, an American business consultant who lived two doors down from Berg on the sixth floor, said that Berg shrugged off his detention as "a minor inconvenience."

On April 8, Berg sent Taee an e-mail explaining why he hadn't been in touch. "I realize you must think I am a real flake for not contacting you as promised, following the last time we spoke in Baghdad," Berg wrote. "Suffice it to say I ran into a little problem in Mosul which held me there for the last two weeks."

The most violent month since the start of the war had begun, and the e-mail betrayed some anxiety: "If you are still in Baghdad, I hope you're keeping your head down. It's getting tough around here. Take it easy and stay in touch!"

On April 10, Berg left the Al-Fanar, leaving behind several belongings -- books, weights and a business-card wallet. In the next three weeks, the State Department sent a consultant to the hotel with Berg's photograph, his frantic family hired a private investigator to help locate him, and Taee even pulled up the records on his Iraqi cell phone to track down leads. Nothing worked.

On Saturday, soldiers on patrol found Berg's body hanging from a highway overpass in Baghdad. His family was notified on Monday. They held a private funeral service on Thursday.

"This is the part that really tears at me: He was really looking forward to having a life, having a relationship with a woman, having children," Duke said. "He was looking forward to that: the pleasure of Thanksgiving, the pleasure of Passover."

Special correspondent Khalid Saffar in Mosul and staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha in Washington contributed to this report.