About Al-Zaidi

Muntader al-Zaidi joined Al-Baghdadiya television in September 2005 after graduating from Baghdad University with a degree in communications.

Two years later, he was seized by gunmen while on an assignment in a Sunni district of north Baghdad. He was freed unharmed three days later after Iraqi television stations broadcast appeals for his release.

At the time, al-Zaidi told reporters he did not know who kidnapped him or why, but on Monday his family blamed al-Qaida in Iraq and said no ransom was paid.

In January he was taken again, this time arrested by American soldiers who searched his apartment building, his brother, Dhirgham, said. He was released the next day with an apology, the brother said.

Those experiences helped mold a deep resentment of both the U.S. military's presence in Iraq and Iran's pervasive influence over Iraq's cleric-dominated Shiite community, according to his family.

"He hates the American physical occupation as much as he hates the Iranian moral occupation," Dhirgham al-Zaidi said, alluding to the influence of pro-Iranian Shiite clerics in political and social life. "As for Iran, he considers the regime to be the other side of the American coin."