Richard Engel of NBC Is Released in Syria
Richard Engel of NBC Is Released in Syria
Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, and three of his crew members were freed on Monday after five days in captivity in Syria, the news organization said Tuesday.
The journalists were unharmed. The news organization released a short statement that said, “We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country.”
The identities of the kidnappers and their motives were unknown. But their kidnapping once again highlights the perils of reporting from Syria, which is said by the Committee to Protect Journalists to be “the world’s most dangerous place for the press.”
NBC declined to specify the number of crew members that were with Mr. Engel but a person with specific knowledge of the situation said there were three. The person did not say whether Mr. Engel was traveling with security
Mr. Engel covertly entered Syria several times this year to report on the insurgency that is fighting President Bashar al-Assad there. He was last seen on television last Thursday in a taped report from Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, where he reported that “the Syrian regime appears to be cracking, but the rebels remain outgunned.” He and his crew members had apparently moved to a safer location outside the country to transmit their report (two days earlier he had reported live on the “Today” show from Turkey, having just come back from Aleppo) because they were detained on Thursday when they were trying to move back into Syria.
Mr. Engel and the crew members, whose names were not released by NBC, were blindfolded by the kidnappers and “tossed into the back of a truck,” NBC’s Web site said. From that point on, NBC had no contact with Mr. Engel or the crew. The network’s Web sitesaid there was “no claim of responsibility, no contact with the captors and no request for ransom during the time the crew was missing,”
Glad he is safe.