The Taliban has released an American engineer they’d kept captive since 2020 in exchange for a Taliban-linked Afghan tribal leader, who was serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison on heroin trafficking charges. Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said the prisoner exchange between American hostage Mark Frerichs and Taliban ally Bashir Noorzai took…

WASHINGTON— An American contractor held hostage in Afghanistan for more than two years has been released in exchange for a convicted Taliban drug lord jailed in the United States, the White House said Monday. Mark Frerichs, a Navy veteran who had spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, was abducted in…

President Joe Biden is calling for the release of Navy Veteran Mark Frerichs, a civil engineer who was taken hostage by the Taliban two years ago. “Threatening the safety of Americans or any innocent civilians is always unacceptable, and hostage-taking is an act of particular cruelty and cowardice,” said the president in a statement released…