Word came in this hour that Canadian freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout and Australian freelancer Nigel Brennan have been freed from captivity in Somalia, where they had been held since their abduction in August 2008.

Details are very thin, but the news came from a Somali MP and staff at the hotel in Mogadishu where the pair are said to be, according to Reuters.

If the news is true, and hopefully it is, it will bring to an end a long ordeal that highlighted the risks taken by freelance journalists. But there will be plenty of time to explore those issues, and learn about their ordeal, later. For now, it's nice to see a happy ending to this story, which first surfaced in the early days of this blog and has been a recurring topic through the past 15 months. A synopsis of some of that coverage can be found in this post about a phone call Amanda Lindhout made to Canadian television network Omni. A more recent post about renewed efforts to free the pair can be found here.