It was a phone call of a life time, of a life.

Dwyer Sullivan was sound asleep early this morning in his daughter's Riverdale home when the phone rang, with news his friend and colleague, Canadian hostage Jim Loney, was free in Iraq.

Loney, a 41-year-old resident of Toronto and a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, was kidnapped from the streets of Baghdad late last year, along with three other peacemakers.

Time and time again ,the captors had threatened to kill the four hostages, and on March 10, the body of Tom Fox, an American team member, was found on a Baghdad street. He'd been shot, and reports indicated signs of torture.

For months now, Sullivan's son-in-law, Mark Connell, and his daughter, Maura Sullivan, have been holding weekly prayer vigils every Thursday at the Sacred Heart Cathedral for the safe return of the peacemakers.

'His whole life has been given to helping others,' Sullivan said. 'And I was very hopeful that his time in captivity could be spent build(ing) a relationship with their captors.'

Sullivan said he does not support any form of armed intervention, and he suspects the situation with Loney and the two other hostages was as much a release by the captors as it was a rescue by a British-led military team.

The word out of Iraq today suggests the military received information from a captured Iraqi who disclosed the location of three hostages. When the rescue team arrived, they found the three hostages with their hands tied, but no captors, and not a single shot was fired.

Sullivan said he immediately went to awaken Mark and Maura, as they too are good friends with Loney.

'It was enormous joy and relief,' Connell said this afternoon. 'And there were lots of tears.'

Oddly enough, he said, the telephone started ringing, with about 10 calls from Whitehorse residents who were still up and had picked up the news.

There were calls from across the country from friends anxious to tell them of their friend's freedom, from around the world.

And Maura was making her own phone calls.

'The telephone tree just sort of took off,' Connell said.

He said Loney had called another good friend in Toronto who in turned called them.

'He said, I am OK, I lost 20 pounds, but I am free,' ' Sullivan recalled of how the conversation between Loney and the friend in Toronto went.

Connell said he expects that once Loney gets back to Canada, he'll be focusing on the same thing he was doing before he left raising the awareness of the situation in Iraq.

The Christian Peacemaker Teams promote peaceful solutions to the world's problems, from a neutral position.

The peacemakers were actually in Iraq in an effort to help Iraqi families find out about missing family members who'd been taken away and are being detained.

The peace organization estimates there are some 16,000 detainees in Iraq who are being mistreated or held unjustly without cause or legal representation.