Syria’s new leadership said Thursday it was searching for missing American journalist Austin Tice and had secured the release of another American it said was being held by the ousted government.
In 2022, US President Joe Biden accused Syria of holding Tice, a freelance photojournalist detained near Damascus a decade earlier, and demanded that the government of Bashar al-Assad release him.
On Sunday, the transitional government that took over power in Syria after Assad’s ouster said the search for US citizen Austin Tice was continuing.
“We reaffirm our readiness to cooperate directly with the US administration to search for American citizens disappeared by the former Assad regime,” the transitional government’s political affairs department said in a statement on Telegram.
In recent days, Syrian settlers and armed men have broken into government prisons and freed prisoners, some of whom have spent decades behind bars.
Another US citizen, Travis Timmerman, “has been released and secured”, the political department statement said.
Residents of the al-Jayabiyyah neighborhood of Damascus said they had found Timerman walking around without shoes.
“Municipality guard Moussa Rifai found him, so we brought him to our home and fed him and he slept for about an hour,” Ziad Nedda said.
He said, “He was placed in the Palestine branch, he wouldn’t stop saying. ‘I was placed in the Palestine branch in Damascus.’
“Palestine Branch”, also known as Branch 235, was a prison run by the Syrian intelligence services under Assad.
Release ‘huge Christmas gift’
According to American media reports, 29-year-old Timerman was last seen in Budapest, Hungary in early June.
His sister Pixie Rogers described his release as a “huge Christmas gift” and said she “can’t wait for the day” when she will be reunited with her brother.
Timmerman’s mother “is very pleased with the information we received today… overwhelmed and extremely excited,” Rogers told US network CBS.
Tice was working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other media outlets when he was detained at a checkpoint in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, on August 14, 2012.
Last week, the missing journalist’s mother, Debra, told reporters that her son was believed to be alive and being “treated well”, without providing further details.
Rebel forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appointed an interim prime minister on Tuesday to lead Syria until March.
Assad fled the country over the weekend, ending his family’s brutal half-century rule.
Sunni Muslim HTS is rooted in Syria’s branch of al-Qaeda and is banned as a terrorist organization by many Western governments, including the United States, although it has recently sought to tone down its rhetoric.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
