The Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout and her Australian counterpart Nigel Brennan have been freed by the Somali militants after their captors collected a USD 800,000 in ransom.

Lindhout and Brennan were released last night at around 8 o'clock, according to Press TV correspondent in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

The freed foreign journalists met with the prime minister of Somalia's transitional federal government in the Presidential Palace on Thursday and then took a private plane to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

The large ransom was paid to the kidnappers by the Somali lawmakers in Garas Balley district, between Mogadishu and Afgoye, where the journalists were abducted 15 months ago.

Lindhout, a freelance journalist with extensive foreign reporting experience, and Brennan, an Australian photographer, were kidnapped at gunpoint last August as they travelled, supposedly, to visit a refugee camp.

Lindhout and Brennan said that they were kept in rough conditions, given little food, faced beatings and torture while holed up in dark, windowless rooms.

"There were times when I was beaten. I was tortured in extremely difficult situations," Lindhout, 28, told the CTV News.

"Yeah, because the money wasn't [coming] quickly enough for these men, and they seemed to think that if they beat me enough, when I was able to speak to my mother... I would be able to say the right things."

RB/MB