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Syria’s new leadership said Thursday it was searching for abducted US journalist Austin Tice and had secured the release of another American it said had been 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.
The transitional government, which took the helm in Syria after Assad’s ouster on Sunday, said that “the search for American citizen Austin Tice is ongoing”.
“We confirm our readiness to cooperate directly with the US administration to search for American citizens disappeared by the former Assad regime,” the transitional government’s department of political affairs added in a statement on Telegram.
In recent days, Syrian residents and armed men have broken into government prisons, freeing inmates, some of whom have spent decades behind bars.
The political department’s statement said that another US citizen, Travis Timmerman, “has been released and secured”.
Residents of the Al-Zyabiyeh neighbourhood of Damascus said they had found Timmerman wandering around without shoes.
“The municipality guard Mousa Rifai found him, so we brought him to our house and fed him and he slept for about an hour,” said Ziyad Nedda.
“He was held in the Palestine Branch, he wouldn’t stop saying it. ‘I was held in the Palestine Branch in Damascus’,” he said.
The “Palestine Branch”, also known as Branch 235, was a prison operated by the Syrian intelligence services under Assad.
– Release ‘huge Christmas present’ –
According to US media reports, 29-year-old Timmerman was last seen in Budapest, Hungary, in early June.
His sister Pixie Rogers described his release as a “huge Christmas present” and said she “can’t wait for that day” she is reunited with her brother.
Timmerman’s mother “is very, very ecstatic… overwhelmed, and just beyond super excited with this information that we got today,” Rogers told the 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 her son is believed to be alive and is being “treated well,” without providing further details.
The 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 a half-century of his family’s iron-fisted rule.
Sunni Muslim HTS is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda and proscribed as a terrorist organisation by many Western governments including the United States, though it has more recently sought to moderate its rhetoric.
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