Taliban leader sentenced to 42 years for kidnapping US journalist

The Taliban commander who abducted an American journalist was sentenced to 42 years in prison on Tuesday after pleading guilty to hostage taking. providing material support for terrorism, the New York Times reported.

The commander, Haji Najibullah, said in his guilty plea last year that he had supported Taliban members who intended to kill US troops and, in 2008, had helped abduct David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, as well as an Afghan journalist. driver accompanying him.

"Najibullah's conduct included supporting. enabling terrorist acts," Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Federal District Court in Manhattan said while issuing her sentence, adding that the defendant had carried out the hostage taking with "casual brutality" and "psychological torture."

Prosecutors had asked Judge Failla for a life sentence, writing to the court that "it is difficult to imagine conduct more sinister. morally wrong than the hostage taking of civilians." They added that Najibullah also bore responsibility for an attack in 2008, by fighters under his command, that killed three US service members and an Afghan interpreter. Some of the victims' bodies were mutilated or burned.

"The defendant led a violent insurgent group hellbent on killing Americans and their allies," the prosecutors wrote.

Najibullah's lawyers, who asked for a prison term of 18 years, wrote that while their client did not contest that his support of the Taliban resulted in the 2008 deaths, he maintained that he had not participated in or directed that attack,. he had not been one of the "main overseers" of the kidnapping.

Before his sentencing on Tuesday, Najibullah addressed the court, apologising to Rohde.

"What happened to him was terrible,. I deeply regret my role in it," he said, before going on to list the ways in which, he said, he had suffered.

Rohde also spoke in court, naming the US service members. Afghan translator who were killed in the 2008 attack, citing "the pain, loss and grief their friends and family endured," and calling hostage taking "a cruel and cowardly crime."

Rohde was an experienced correspondent trying to speak with Najibullah while doing research for a book when he was abducted along with the Afghan journalist, Tahir Ludin,. their driver, Asadullah Mangal.

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