US reporter's Afghan kidnap ordeal kept secret until escape

A REPORTER for The New York Times who was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan escaped with an Afghan colleague at the weekend after more than seven months in captivity.

The kidnapping of David Rohde, a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal had been kept secret until now by the Times and dozens of other media organisations out of concern for the men's safety.

All three were abducted outside Kabul on November 10 after Rohde had been invited to interview a Taliban commander in Logar province.

Rohde, 41, told his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, that Ludin and he climbed over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. They made their way to a nearby Pakistani Frontier Corps base and were flown to the US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan.

It was unclear why Mr Mangal did not escape with them. Ludin, 35, who was an interpreter for Rohde, injured his foot in the escape.

Rohde had travelled to Afghanistan in early November to work on a book about the history of US involvement there.

Ms Mulvihill expressed relief at the end of the ordeal and gratitude to people who offered advice and support.

Rohde's family and the Times declined to discuss details of efforts to free the men but said no ransom money had been paid and no Taliban, or other prisoners, had been released.

At least 40 news organisations, including Al-Jazeera, kept quiet about the story at the request of the executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller. "We agonised over it at the outset and, periodically, over the last seven months," Mr Keller said of the decision to suppress the story.

He said he consulted government experts and other news organisations that had been through similar experiences.

There was "a pretty firm consensus that you really amp up the danger when you go public", he said. "It makes us cringe to sit on a news story," but "the freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish".

The unusual arrangement raises questions about whether journalists were giving special treatment to one of their own.

"It does involve a news organisation keeping quiet and asking others to keep quiet," said Phil Bronstein, a former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "What shocks me is that it was so successful."

Mainstream news outlets held the line; bloggers who mentioned the kidnapping were contacted by the Times and, in each case, "they took it down", Mr Keller said.

The executive editor of The Washington Post, Marcus Brauchli, said he discussed the issue with staff.

"We obviously would always err in favour of the safety of the reporter," Mr Brauchli said.

In the eyes of kidnappers, "someone may go from low-value capture to high-value capture by virtue of publicity", he said. "I would hope we wouldn't treat anybody's life any differently if there was a safety issue involved."

Rohde was co-chief of the South-Asia bureau of the Times from 2002 to 2005. Years before, he had been taken prisoner while reporting in Bosnia. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre.

Ludin has worked with The Times of London and other news organisations.

In several previous cases, kidnapped journalists have drawn substantial coverage, either because their captors made demands or their families or employers thought the spotlight would be beneficial.

A Christian Science Monitor reporter, Jill Carroll, was abducted in Baghdad in 2006 and released about three months later after a concerted campaign. A Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, was murdered less than a month after his newspaper made public his 2002 kidnapping in Pakistan.