A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist held hostage by the Taliban for months in Afghanistan shot a death glare at his captor in Manhattan court Monday — before the terrorist was slapped with a 42-year sentence.
“Hostage taking is a cowardly and cruel crime,” said David Rohde, as he stared down ex-Taliban commander Haji Najibullah, who pleaded guilty 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 responsibility for his actions as I look at him right now,” Rohde added, as Najibullah, 50, stared straight ahead, not making eye contact with his victim from his seat at the defense table.
Manhattan federal prosecutors had pushed for Najibullah to get a life sentence for allegedly abducting Rohde, his interpreter Asadullah Mangal and local reporter Tahir Ludin and ordering them to hike across the border to Pakistan, where they were held hostage through the winter.
The trio’s captors pointed machine guns to their heads while filming chilling hostage videos and demanding a multimillion-dollar ransom from Rohde’s family — along with the release of Taliban prisoners — in exchange for their freedom, prosecutors said.
“If you don’t help me, I will die,” Rohde — who had been employed by the New York Times when he was abducted — said in one harrowing 2009 video cited by the feds.
Prosecutors also accused Najibullah of playing a role in a slew of Taliban attacks, including the June 2008 ambush of a US convoy that killed three American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.
“He reveled in the targeted killings of American service members,” prosecutor David Robles said Tuesday, calling Najibullah’s conduct “callous, brazen and depraved.”
After seven months and 10 days in captivity, Rohde and Ludin daringly escaped after using a rope to lift themselves out of the Taliban compound as their tormentors slept, Rohde wrote in his 2010 book, “A Rope and a Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping.” Mangal escaped five weeks later.
Wearing a tan jail-issued jumpsuit, Najibullah gave a soft-spoken attempt at an apology to Rohde and his family Tuesday afternoon, as he read from a prepared statement.
“What happened to him was terrible, and I deeply regret my role in it,” he told the court through an interpreter.
Najibullah, who has been held without bail since his arrest in October 2020, also claimed that the US war on Afghanistan had left him “no choice” but to become a Taliban member.
Other Taliban terrorists were furious that he had allowed Rohde to escape, and later killed Najibullah’s brother as punishment, he added.
His court-appointed federal defender, Andrew Dalack, had urged Judge Katherine Folk Failla for leniency, asking for an 18-year prison sentence for someone he denied was the “monster” portrayed by the feds.
“He’s a human being with a complicated story,” Dalack told the court.
The government has also not provided direct evidence that Najibullah was behind the fatal 2008 attack cited by prosecutors, the attorney argued.
As he addressed the court, Rohde began to choke up as he ripped Najibullah for being a serial “liar.”
First, the terrorist lied about the 2008 purported interview-turned-kidnapping, he said.
Rohde, who is now a national security reporter at MS NOW, then described the terrorist falsely claiming to fellow Taliban members that Rohde was a US “spy” rather than reveal the truth — that he was a journalist who had simply wanted to hear his story.
“I couldn’t be prouder of being part of this profession,” Rohde told the court, holding back tears.
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