CNN
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An American citizen who has spent more than two years in detention in Afghanistan was released on Thursday, and is now on his way to the United States, a source with knowledge of the situation told CNN.
George Glezmann, 66, was released after weeks of negotiations led by Qatari and US mediators. The source said a breakthrough was made by Qatar during a recent meeting with the Taliban.
US hostage envoy Adam Boehler had also been in close contact with his Qatari counterparts to secure Glezmann’s release, the source said. Boehler was expected to accompany Glezmann on the journey back to the US from Kabul.
Photographs of Boehler and former US Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad meeting with Taliban officials were released by a spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday.
Khalilzad confirmed Glezmann’s release on X, saying: “Today is a good day. We succeeded in obtaining the release of an American citizen, Georg(e) Glezmann, after two years in detention in Kabul.”
“The Taliban government agreed to free him as a goodwill gesture to (the US president) and the American people. George is on his way home to his family,” he added.
CNN has reached out to the US State Department for comment.
Glezmann was detained by the Taliban in December 2022, some 16 months after the group retook control of Afghanistan, and was declared wrongfully detained by the US in September 2023.
He had traveled to Afghanistan for a five-day trip “to explore the cultural landscape and rich history of the country,” according to US Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, who campaigned for Glezmann’s release.
The two lawmakers said last July that Glezmann was held in “a nine-foot by nine-foot cell with other detainees and has been held in solitary confinement and underground for months at a time.”
In the period up to July 2024, Glezmann had not been granted any consular visits by US officials and had “only seven phone calls totaling 54 minutes with his family,” the senators said.
They added that Glezmann received “limited in-person visits with representatives of Qatar.”
The US does not have a diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, having closed its embassy there after the Taliban takeover in August 2022. Instead, Qatar represents the US in Afghanistan, acting as its “protective power.”
Glezmann is the third US citizen to be freed from Afghanistan this year, after Ryan Corbett and William McKenty were released in a prisoner exchange in January.
The deal to release Corbett and McKenty was struck in the last hours of former President Joe Biden’s time in office after the Taliban agreed to swap them for Khan Mohammed, a Taliban member who was serving a life sentence for narco-terrorism in a US prison.
That agreement was also facilitated by Qatar, which hosted several rounds of US negotiations with the Taliban and also provided logistical support to the operations to get the pair out of Kabul, according to multiple people familiar with the details of the swap.
US officials had wanted Glezmann and another American held in Afghanistan, Mahmoud Habibi, to be part of the deal, and expressed disappointment at the time that the two weren’t handed over in January. However, they said they couldn’t turn down the offer for at least Corbett and McKenty.
The Taliban has never acknowledged holding Habibi but the US still considers him a hostage.
Glezmann’s wife Aleksandra Glezmann said last July that her husband’s health was failing. In a letter to Biden, she wrote that he had a benign tumor on one side of his face, was losing vision in one eye and had developed sores and ulcers on his body.
