A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist held hostage by the Taliban for months in Afghanistan shot a loss of life glare at his captor in Manhattan courtroom Monday — earlier than the terrorist was slapped with a 42-year sentence.
“Hostage taking is a cowardly and merciless crime,” mentioned David Rohde, as he stared down ex-Taliban commander Haji Najibullah, who pleaded responsible in April to kidnapping the veteran reporter at gunpoint in Kabul in November 2008 after luring the journalist with the promise of sitting down for an interview.
“He’s refusing to take duty for his actions as I have a look at him proper now,” Rohde added, as Najibullah, 50, stared straight forward, not making eye contact together with his sufferer from his seat on the protection desk.
Manhattan federal prosecutors had pushed for Najibullah to get a life sentence for allegedly abducting Rohde, his interpreter Asadullah Mangal and native reporter Tahir Ludin and ordering them to hike throughout the border to Pakistan, the place they have been held hostage via the winter.
The trio’s captors pointed machine weapons to their heads whereas filming chilling hostage movies and demanding a multimillion-dollar ransom from Rohde’s household — together with the discharge of Taliban prisoners — in trade for his or her freedom, prosecutors mentioned.
“In case you don’t assist me, I’ll die,” Rohde — who had been employed by the New York Occasions when he was kidnapped — mentioned in a single harrowing 2009 video cited by the feds.
Prosecutors additionally accused Najibullah of taking part in a task in a slew of Taliban assaults, together with the June 2008 ambush of a US convoy that killed three American troopers and their Afghan interpreter.
“He reveled within the focused killings of American service members,” prosecutor David Robles mentioned Tuesday, calling Najibullah’s conduct “callous, brazen and wicked.”
After seven months and 10 days in captivity, Rohde and Ludin daringly escaped after utilizing a rope to raise themselves out of the Taliban compound as their tormentors slept, Rohde wrote in his 2010 e-book, “A Rope and a Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping.” Mangal escaped 5 weeks later.
Sporting a tan jail-issued jumpsuit, Najibullah gave a soft-spoken try at an apology to Rohde and his household Tuesday afternoon, as he learn from a ready assertion.
“What occurred to him was horrible, and I deeply remorse my position in it,” he instructed the courtroom via an interpreter.
Najibullah, who has been held with out bail since his arrest in October 2020, additionally claimed that the US conflict on Afghanistan had left him “no selection” however to change into a Taliban member.
Different Taliban terrorists have been livid that he had allowed Rohde to flee, and later killed Najibullah’s brother as punishment, he added.
His court-appointed federal defender, Andrew Dalack, had urged Decide Katherine Folks Failla for leniency, asking for an 18-year jail sentence for somebody he denied was the “monster” portrayed by the feds.
“He’s a human being with an advanced story,” Dalack instructed the courtroom.
The federal government has additionally not offered direct proof that Najibullah was behind the deadly 2008 assault cited by prosecutors, the legal professional argued.
As he addressed the courtroom, Rohde started to choke up as he ripped Najibullah for being a serial “liar.”
First, the terrorist lied in regards to the 2008 purported interview-turned-kidnapping, he mentioned.
Rohde, who’s now a nationwide safety reporter at MS NOW, then described the terrorist falsely claiming to fellow Taliban members that Rohde was a US “spy” quite than reveal the reality — that he was a journalist who had merely wished to listen to his story.
“I couldn’t be prouder of being a part of this occupation,” Rohde instructed the courtroom, holding again tears.
