The NGO Hostage Aid Worldwide announced Tuesday in Damascus that it had “data” according to which American journalist Austin Tice, missing in Syria since 2012, is “alive”.
“We have data that Austin is alive until January 2024, and the President of the United States said in August that he is alive, and we are confident that he is alive today,” said Nizar Zakka, president of this NGO which works with families to free kidnapped civilians. “We try to be as transparent as possible and share as much information as possible,” he added.
He was the one CNN journalist Clarissa Ward was looking for in a regime prison when she came across a Syrian intelligence officer posing as a prisoner.
The Lebanese-American Nizar Zakka showed, with supporting photo, all the sites where his NGO believes that Tice was imprisoned between November 2017 and February 2024 by the power of Bashar al-Assad, overthrown two weeks ago by a coalition of rebels.
The Syrian authorities never said they had arrested the journalist. Austin Tice's mother, Debra, said earlier this month that she had information that her son was alive, while Syria's new power claimed to be looking for him.
Nizar Zakka also claimed that Syrian-American bishop Yohanna Ibrahim kidnapped in 2013 was seen in a prison five years later. Yohanna Ibrahim is an “American citizen. He was seen in 2018 in branch 291, a prison in Damascus, said Nizar Zakka, who himself was detained in Iran on espionage charges between 2015 and 2019. The NGO did not specify whether it believed that he was still alive.
The head of the Syriac Orthodox diocese of Aleppo (north) was kidnapped along with Boulos Yaziji, head of the city's Greek Orthodox diocese, in April 2013 near Aleppo. The Syrian authorities then accused jihadists of having kidnapped them.
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