Southwest Missouri man freed from Syrian prison after 7 months in detention

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — An American who turned up in Syria on Thursday says he was detained after crossing into the country on foot seven months ago on a Christian pilgrimage.

Travis Timmerman appears to have been among thousands of people released from the country’s notorious prisons after rebels reached Damascus over the weekend, overthrowing President Bashar Assad and ending his family’s 54-year rule.

As video emerged online of Timmerman on Thursday, he was initially mistaken by some for Austin Tice, an American journalist who went missing in Syria 12 years ago.

In the video, Timmerman could be seen lying on a mattress under a blanket in what appeared to be a private house. A group of men in the video said that he was being treated well and would be safely returned home. It was not immediately clear where Timmerman had been held.

This year, a Missouri State Highway Patrol bulletin identified him as Pete Travis Timmerman, 29, and said he had gone missing in Hungary in early June. In late August, Hungarian police put out a missing persons announcement saying that Timmerman was last seen at a church in Hungary’s capital, Budapest.

Missouri court records indicate that Timmerman is from Urbana, Missouri, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Springfield in the southwestern part of the state.

U.S. officials said they were working to confirm Timmerman’s identity and provide the support needed. From Aqaba, Jordan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that the White House was “working to bring him home, to bring him out of Syria” but declined further comment for privacy reasons.

“I can’t give you any details on exactly what’s going to happen,” he said.

Timmerman later gave an interview with the Al-Arabiya TV network, saying he had illegally crossed into Syria on foot from the eastern Lebanese town of Zahle seven months ago before being detained and held in a cell alone.

He said that he was treated well in detention, but could hear other young men being tortured.

“It was OK. I was fed. I was watered. The one difficulty was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to,” he said. He said he was only allowed to go three times a day.

“I was not beaten and the guards treated me decently,” he added.

The U.S. government’s top hostage negotiator, Roger Carstens, traveled to Lebanon earlier this week in hopes of collecting information on the whereabouts of Tice.

President Joe Biden has said his administration believed Tice was alive and was committed to bringing him home, though he also acknowledged on Sunday that “we have no direct evidence” of his status. The case has frustrated U.S. intelligence officials for years.

On Thursday, Blinken emphasized the administration’s work on Tice’s case.

“Every single day we are working to find him and to bring him home” Blinken said. “This is a priority for the United States.”

Tice, who has had his work published by The Washington Post, McClatchy newspapers and others, disappeared at a checkpoint in a contested area west of Damascus in August 2012 as the Syrian civil war intensified.

A video released weeks after Tice went missing showed him blindfolded and held by armed men. He hasn’t been heard from since. Assad’s government had denied that it was holding him.

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