NEW YORK – The Taliban commander who abducted an American journalist was sentenced to 42 years in prison on June 9 after pleading guilty to hostage taking and providing material support for terrorism.
The commander, Haji Najibullah, said in his guilty plea in 2025that 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 and driver accompanying him.
“Mr Najibullah’s conduct included supporting and enabling terrorist acts,” Judge Katherine Polk Failla of US 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 Failla for a life sentence, writing to the court that “it is difficult to imagine conduct more sinister and 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, and he had not been one of the “main overseers” of the kidnapping.
The defence added that Najibullah’s remorse, relatively low rank within the Taliban and limited time as a commander meant that he was “not an unrepentant terrorist deserving of a sentence guaranteeing that he will only leave prison in a pine box”.
Before his sentencing on June 9, Najibullah addressed the court, apologising to Rohde.
“What happened to him was terrible, and 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 and 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, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. They were then taken to a Taliban-controlled section of Pakistan.
Najibullah accused the three of being spies, according to prosecutors, and interrogated them for information about their families. The men under his command showed the captives Taliban propaganda videos that included footage of beheadings, prosecutors added.
The captors tried for months to use Rohde and the others for ransom payments and the release of Taliban prisoners. The hostages were forced to make calls and videos pleading for help, according to court papers, including one in which Rohde asked for his life to be spared while a machine gun was pointed at his face.
After seven months of captivity, Rohde and Ludin escaped from a Taliban compound, using a scavenged piece of rope to climb down a wall at night before walking to a Pakistani military base. Mangal fled about five weeks later during a firefight, prosecutors wrote. NYTIMES