The US on Monday vowed to make all efforts to deliver again journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, with a US envoy heading to the area after strongman Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow.
Roger Carstens, the US particular envoy on hostage affairs, has arrived in close by Beirut on a mission to seek out info on Tice, US officers stated.
“With each occasion we have interaction, we’ll proceed to hunt details about Austin Tice in order that we will discover him and convey him residence to his household and family members,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated throughout an occasion on the State Division.
State Division spokesman Matthew Miller stated of Carstens’s go to that the US was able to “have interaction with any group which may have details about the whereabouts of Austin Tice.”
“As Secretary Blinken has stated on to Austin’s household, together with prior to now few days, we won’t relaxation till he’s returned residence safely to his family members,” Miller instructed reporters.
He stated that anybody with info on Tice’s whereabouts ought to contact the FBI and was eligible for a reward.
Tice’s mom, Debra Tice, stated Friday that she had info from the US authorities that her son is alive and being “handled effectively.”
Tice is a contract photojournalist who was working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy Information, The Washington Submit, CBS and different information organizations when he was detained at a checkpoint in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, on August 14, 2012.
Little info has been made public since his abduction. He appeared blindfolded in a video in September 2012, when he was 31, however the identification of the abductors stays unknown to this present day.
In 2022, President Joe Biden accused Syria of holding Tice and referred to as on its then authorities to assist safe his launch.
Assad fled the nation over the weekend after a lightning assault by rebels ended a half-century of his household’s iron-fisted rule.
