Damascus, Syria:
Syria's new leadership said Thursday it was searching for missing American journalist Austin Tice and had secured the release of another American they 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 Bashar al-Assad's government release him.
The transitional government, which took over in Syria on Sunday after Assad's ouster, said “the search for US citizen Austin Tice continues.”
“We reaffirm our willingness to cooperate directly with the US government in the search for US citizens disappeared by the former Assad regime,” the transitional government's political affairs department added in a statement on Telegram.
In recent days, Syrian residents and gunmen have broken into government prisons and released prisoners, some of whom have spent decades behind bars.
The political department statement said another US citizen, Travis Timmerman, “has been released and secured.”
Residents of Al-Zyabiyeh neighborhood in Damascus said they found Carpenter without shoes.
“The municipal guard Mousa Rifai found him, so we brought him to our house and fed him, and he slept for about an hour,” Ziyad Nedda said.
“He was held in the Palestinian Division, he kept saying it. 'I was detained in the Palestinian Division in Damascus,'” he said.
The “Palestine Branch”, also known as Branch 235, was a prison operated by the Syrian intelligence services under Assad.
Release 'big 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 “big Christmas present” and said she “can't wait for that day” when she is reunited with her brother.
Timmerman's mother “is very, very ecstatic…overwhelmed and beyond excited about this information that we got today,” Rogers told CBS.
Tice worked for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other media when he was detained at a checkpoint in Daraya, a Damascus suburb, on August 14, 2012.
Last week, the missing journalist's mother, Debra, told reporters that her son is believed to be alive and “being treated well,” without providing further details.
The rebels, 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 this weekend, ending half a century of his family's iron rule.
The Sunni Islamist HTS is rooted in the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda and has been designated a terrorist organization by many Western governments, including the United States, although it has recently tried to tone down its rhetoric.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
