Taliban Leader Pleads Guilty to Taking American Journalist Hostage

New York Times

25-04-2025

Haji Najibullah once commanded more than a thousand Taliban militants who waged a ruthless insurgency against U.S. and Afghan enemies.
In summer 2008, federal prosecutors say, some of those fighters attacked a U.S. military convoy, killing three American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter. Three months later, Mr. Najibullah's men destroyed an Afghan border patrol outpost, an indictment said.
A month after that, Mr. Najibullah's forces shot down a U.S. military helicopter, the indictment said. And then Mr. Najibullah took part in the kidnapping of an American journalist and two Afghan men and demanded millions of dollars and the freeing of Taliban prisoners as their ransom.
On Friday, Mr. Najibullah entered a courtroom in Manhattan wearing tan prison garb and a dark-colored skullcap, with his wrists and ankles shackled. He then pleaded guilty to hostage-taking and providing material support for terrorism.
Mr. Najibullah, who told the judge he was 'about 49,' could finish his life in prison. He is to be sentenced in October.
His appearance, before Judge Katherine Polk Failla, of Federal District Court, came nearly 20 years after the actions described in an indictment. It came nearly five years after Mr. Najibullah was brought to the United States from Ukraine and arrested in the kidnapping of the American reporter, David Rohde, then of The New York Times, and nearly four years after he was charged with four counts of murder and other crimes for the 2008 attack.
Addressing Judge Failla, Mr. Najibullah acknowledged that U.S. soldiers were killed as a result of his actions as a Taliban leader between 2007 and 2009, and that those soldiers and their allies had been targeted by suicide attackers and improvised explosive devices.
'I also participated in the hostage-taking of David Rohde and his companions,' Mr. Najibullah said, adding that those hostages were then 'forced to convey the Taliban's demands.'
The case, stemming from America's yearslong war in Afghanistan, was heard in a civilian court thousands of miles away. Mr. Najibullah's lawyers had filed a motion arguing that he should not be prosecuted in such a setting for the 2008 killings and related acts under the Geneva Conventions, a set of rules that outlines lawful treatment of combatants and prisoners. Judge Failla denied the motion.
In a letter to the court last year, prosecutors described an interview that Mr. Najibullah had given to the television channel France 24 in the fall of 2008. In the interview, Mr. Najibullah spoke about how to use a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, prosecutors wrote, stated that his men were prepared to fight the 'holy war,' and added that they were ready to 'put on a belt and blow themselves up.'
The bloodiest incident described in the charges occurred in 2008, when a U.S. convoy was hit during a combat patrol about 50 miles south of Kabul. That Taliban assault killed three U.S. soldiers: Sgt. First Class Matthew L. Hilton, 37, of Livonia, Mich.; Sgt. First Class Joseph A. McKay, 51, of Cambria Heights, Queens; and Specialist Mark C. Palmateer, 38, of Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Their Afghan interpreter, Muhammad Fahim, 21, was also killed.
Weeks later, an article in The Times described that attack, saying the soldiers died as mines and rocket-propelled grenades hit their vehicles. At least one soldier was dragged off and chopped into pieces, according to Afghan and Western officials.
Mr. Najibullah's fighters soon struck again in the same area, within Wardak Province. They used rocket-propelled grenades to knock a U.S. helicopter out of the sky and were quick to claim responsibility, according to the indictment, saying that the craft had been shot down by the 'mujahedeen of the Islamic Emirate.'
The kidnapping of Mr. Rohde, along with an Afghan journalist named Tahir Ludin and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, then followed. Mr. Rohde, who was researching a book, had been on his way to interview a Taliban commander in Logar Province, outside Kabul.
According to prosecutors, that commander was Mr. Najibullah.
He was among several men armed with machine guns who kidnapped the journalists and the driver, prosecutors said, and held them hostage in Pakistan. There, according to court papers, the captors forced the abductees to make calls and videos begging for help, including one in which Mr. Rohde asked for his life to be spared while a machine gun was pointed at his face.
After more than seven months in captivity, Mr. Rohde and Mr. Ludin escaped from a Taliban compound in North Waziristan. They tired guards with a late-night board game session, waited for them to fall asleep and then used a scavenged piece of rope to drop down a 20-foot wall at night, the sound of their landing masked by a noisy air-conditioner.
The two journalists then walked to a Pakistani militia post. Mr. Mangal did not participate in their escape, but five weeks later he, too, managed to flee.
Mr. Rohde, now the senior executive editor for national security at NBC News, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.