An American citizen found in the suburbs of Damascus on Thursday says he was detained after crossing into the country by foot on a Christian pilgrimage seven months ago, raising hopes for other foreign nationals missing in Syria.
The man was identified later as Travis Pete Timmerman, aged 29, from Missouri, last seen in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in late May.
He appears to be among the thousands of people released from Syria’s notorious prisons after rebels reached Damascus over the weekend, toppling President Bashar al-Assad and ending his family’s 54-year rule.
As video of Timmerman emerged online on Thursday, he was initially mistaken by some for Austin Tice, an American journalist who went missing in Syria 12 years ago. The footage showed a group of men gesturing at a shaken-looking, pale man with a beard who was lying on the floor, identifying him as “an American journalist”.
In the video, Timmerman could be seen lying on a mattress under a blanket in what appeared to be a private house. A group of men in the video said he was being treated well and would be returned home safely.
US officials said they were working to confirm Timmerman’s identity and provide support. Speaking in Aqaba in Jordan, secretary of state, Antony Blinken told reporters that Washington was “working to bring him home, to bring him out of Syria” but declined to comment further.
A Missouri State Highway Patrol bulletin earlier this year said Timmerman, from Urbana Missouri, had gone missing in Hungary in early June. Two months later, Hungarian police said Timmerman was last seen at a church in Budapest.
Timmerman’s mother, Stacey Collins Gardiner, told National Public Radio that he left for Budapest with the goal of writing about his Christian faith and helping people.
After losing contact with him during his stay in Hungary, Gardiner later learned that her son had gone to Lebanon. She heard the news of his discovery in media reports.
“I will hug him. ... And then I probably won’t let him go,” she said, laughing. “I’ll say, well, thank God you’re still alive. And I’m so happy. Our prayers came true.”
A spokesperson for the US state department said: “We’re aware of reports of an American found outside of Damascus and seeking to provide support. Out of respect for his privacy, we have no further information to provide at this time.”
A statement from political affairs department of Syria’s recently-installed transitional government in Damascus said Timmerman had briefly been taken into their custody, while “a search is underway for American citizen Austin Tice.”
It said the new leadership in Damascus is ready “too cooperate directly with the US administration to search for American citizens disappeared by the former Assad regime.”
According to reporters at the scene, Timmerman said he went to Syria on a pilgrimage. He said he had crossed the border from Lebanon on foot before being detained, and imprisoned for seven months. Locals reported finding him naked and barefoot in the Damascus suburbs, while the Turkish state news agency Anadolu said he had been released from the notorious Sednaya prison.
Video shared by Syria television showed Timmerman saying a Syrian man had helped him and a woman escape the prison where they had been held following the collapse of the regime. Timmerman told Al Arabiya that he had heard others being tortured while he was in detention, but he had not been mistreated.
“It was OK. I was fed. I was watered. The one difficulty was that I couldn’t go to the bathroom when I wanted to,” he said. “I was not beaten and the guards treated me decently.”
The discovery of one US citizen sparked hopes among some that those combing Syria’s expansive network of detention centres, jail cells, and military hospitals used to detain and torture people could locate others long disappeared under the reign of Bashar al-Assad.
Assad’s brutal regime collapsed rapidly amid a sweeping insurgent advance less than a week ago, with Syrians rushing to detention facilities to force open the doors and liberate those inside. Foreign nationals, including Lebanese and Jordanians, walked free among the tens of thousands of Syrians, including some who had been detained in unknown locations for decades.
Family and supporters of Austin Tice have long said they believe he is still alive, after he was captured in the Damascus suburb of Daraya in August 2012 while working as a freelance journalist for CBS, the Washington Post and McClatchy newspapers.
Multiple sources including a former Czech ambassador to Damascus, long the only point of contact between Syria and the western world, said Tice was being held by the Syrian state despite a video released in late 2012 that purported to show him in the captivity of an armed group.
US president Joe Biden has said his administration believed Tice was alive and remains committed to bringing him home, although he acknowledged earlier this week that “we have no direct evidence,” about Tice’s condition or status.
Blinken said that US officials have not given up trying to find Tice, whose case has been pursued by multiple administrations in an effort to find and free him.
“Every single day we are working to find him and to bring him home” Blinken said. “This is a priority for the United States.”
Jacob Tice, Austin’s brother, told Christiane Amanpour of CNN earlier this week: “We have heard from sources that have been vetted by the US government that Austin is alive and he has been well taken care of, those reports are recent, they are fresh and we have every confidence that they are accurate.”
The FBI has offered a reward of up to $1m for information that could facilitate Tice’s safe return, as investigators search the country. The US government’s chief hostage negotiator, Roger Carstens, is reportedly in Beirut, while the US has conveyed messages to the insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham now in charge in Syria that locating Tice is a priority.
Mouaz Moustafa, who heads the DC lobby group the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), which liaises with both rebel groups and the US government, is in Damascus and scouring sites across Syria to try to locate Tice or trace his recent journey.
Maria Cure, of SETF, said: “He has made it a priority while he’s there to find all Americans wrongfully detained in Syria, including Majd Kamalmaz, Austin Tice and others whose names are not public.”
Associated Press contributed reporting
