BOSTON (AP) – The family of a translator killed when American reporter Jill Carroll was kidnapped in Iraq said in an interview aired on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” Tuesday night they told her they do not blame her for his death.

The wife and father of Alan Enwiya were being interviewed by a CNN reporter at their home in Amman, Jordan, when Carroll called them. It was the family’s first contact with Carroll since she was kidnapped Jan. 7, according to CNN, which did not give a date for the conversation.

The Christian Science Monitor reporter returned to Boston last weekend after being unexpectedly released March 30. She has been in seclusion with her family this week except for a visit to the newspapers’s Boston newsroom on Monday.

Enwiya’s father, Raymond Enwiya, said he would not let Carroll take responsibility for his son’s death.

“I said no, it’s not your fault,” he told CNN through a translator.

The morning he was killed, Alan Enwiya and Carroll were headed for an interview with a prominent Sunni Arab politician.

Enwiya’s wife said she knew he would have tried to save Carroll. “He used to tell his friends, the day that anything happens to Jill, like what happened to her … naturally he would never allow himself to leave her,” she said.

His father said Carroll told them what they already suspected, that Enwiya could have fled, but he tried to save her from the kidnappers, even though he was unarmed.

“They were just like brother and sister,” Raymond Enwiya told CNN.

“I told her … that … instead of Alan, you are my daughter now,” he said. “She said ‘I am your daughter.'”