(by Lorenzo Trombetta) (ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, OCTOBER 10 - A series of questions without answers leaves some dark spots on the happy ending to the story of the two American journalists, disappearing first in Lebanon and then reappearing in Syria where hey were taken into custody with the excuse that they had entered the country illegally. Taylor Luck and Holli Chmela, 23 and 27 years old, journalists for Amman's Jordan Times, returned home to the Jordanian capital ''safe and sound'' early this morning. Yesterday evening, nine days after they disappeared, they were released by Syrian authorities and handed over to officials from the US Embassy in Damascus. Upon his arrival in the Jordanian capital, Luck told ANSA his version of the facts, which are in contrast to the official Syrian one. Damascus accused the two of having entered the country illegally ''with the help of a smuggler''. ''After arriving near to the Lebanon-Syria border - Luck said this morning - the taxi driver and his accomplice tried to rob us, when a military vehicle appeared and some soldiers got out. They took our passports and cellular phones and loaded us in the transport''. ''After which we realized we were in Syria - his version continues - but we decided to say that we were tourists and not journalists. They took us to a prison near Homs (160km north of Damascus) where we remained, in separate cells from October 1st to October 8th''. ''At the moment of our transfer to a military prison in Damascus, an official identified Holli from the photos seen on TV and we were identified as 'the two missing journalists'. Only at that point - he adds - were we handed over to the US Embassy in Damascus''. Luck concludes: ''In any case we were treated well and they seemed to understand the difficulty of our situation. Maybe we were naive, but in any case we were victims''. Luck's version is also different from that which appeared today in the Lebanese and Pan-Arabian press: for a ''Syrian security source'' quoted in the pro-Syrian newspaper as-Safir in Beirut, the two journalists ''had gone to a travel agency in northern Lebanon in order to go to Syria. When they discovered that it would be difficult to enter without visas, they accepted the offer to cross the border with a taxi driver who was in contact with some smugglers''. The passage, which cost a little under 100 euros total (6,000 Syrian lire), is said to have taken place in the Wadi Khaled border area, not far from where they were arrested by a Syrian border patrol. According to the source quoted by as-Safir, the episode happened yesterday, and not October 1st. According to the reconstruction of the Pan-Arabian newspaper al-Hayat edited in London, Luck and Chmela were not headed to Syria before October 7th: eye-witnesses quoted by the newspaper confirm to have seen the two young Americans in Beirut's crowded nightclubs at least as recent as October 6th. Their ''illegal'' passage to Syria, in fact there is no trace of them in Lebanese border records, whether it was accidental (as Luck sustains) or voluntary (as the Syrians sustain), according to al-Hayat it happened at the earliest the night of October 7th. (ANSAmed).