The American citizen found near the Syrian capital Damascus is named Travis Timmerman, and is not missing US journalist Austin Tice as initially reported.
Speaking to Al Arabiya on Thursday, Timmerman said he had come to Syria on a religious trip seven months ago, adding that he had been imprisoned by the ousted Syrian regime since. He said he was in Lebanon before entering Syria illegally.
Timmerman told Al Arabiya’s correspondent that he was not aware of the case of Tice, an America journalist abducted in Syria in 2012.
The American citizen found near the Syrian capital Damascus is named Travis Timmerman, and is not missing US journalist Austin Tice as initially reported.
Speaking to Al Arabiya on Thursday, Timmerman said he had come to Syria on a religious trip seven months ago, adding that he had been imprisoned by the ousted Syrian regime since. He said he was in Lebanon before entering Syria illegally.
Timmerman told Al Arabiya’s correspondent that he was not aware of the case of Tice, an America journalist abducted in Syria in 2012.
“I came [to Syria] on a religious pilgrimage, I’m a Christian,” Timmerman said.
He said that he did not experience mistreatment while detained in Syrian regime prisons but added that he could hear the sounds of people being tortured “daily.”
Tice’s mother, Debra Tice, said last week that she had information from the US government that her son is alive and being “treated well.”
Tice is a freelance photojournalist who was working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other news organizations when he was detained at a checkpoint in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, on August 14, 2012.
Little information has been made public since his abduction. He appeared blindfolded in a video in September 2012, when he was 31, but the identity of the kidnappers remains unknown to this day.
In 2022, President Joe Biden accused Syria of holding Tice and called on Bashar al-Assad’s regime to help secure his release.
Al-Assad fled the country over the weekend after a lightning assault by opposition forces ended a half-century of his family’s iron-fisted rule.
Al-Arabiya
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