Richard Engel, NBC’s award-winning chief foreign correspondent, was kidnapped in war-torn Syria and held for five days before being released unharmed, the network announced today.
The network said early today that Engel and his crew had been kidnapped by “an unknown group,” but that are currently out of the country.
A Turkish media report yesterday that Engel and Aziz Akyavas, a Turkish journalist working with Engel, had been missing since last week quickly went viral and fueled fears they had been killed in the fighting.
Engel, 39, is fluent in Arabic and covered Iraq during the country’s last two wars and served as NBC’s Mideast bureau chief before he was promoted to top foreign correspondent.
The Turkish news report quickly spread on social media.
Engel’s NBC colleague David Schuster tweeted, “Original report from Turkish media . . . Praying it is wrong.”
In his latest report, which aired on NBC’s “Nightly News” last week, Engel interviewed rebel fighters in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, and said President Bashar al-Assad’s regime appeared to be doomed.
Engel also described the city’s massive war damage, power outages and the food and health-care shortages that residents are enduring.
Engel, a Peabody Award winner, had previously reported on the Libyan civil war, the revolt that overthrew Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and other events of the Arab Spring.
Western news organizations did not report the kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde in Afghanistan in 2008. His plight was disclosed only after he and an associate, who was also abducted by the Taliban, managed to escape after eight months.
Syria has been especially dangerous for foreign journalists, and several have been held captive, wounded or even killed since the civil war erupted there in early 2011.
American Marie Colvin, a correspondent for Britain’s Sunday Times who was originally from Oyster Bay, LI, was killed along with a French photographer in a February shelling attack in the central city of Homs.
More than 40,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad’s government began, according to the United Nations.
With Post Wire Services