Syria’s Damascus A man who appeared on footage that surfaced overnight and purported to show an American who was missing in Syria told NBC News on Thursday that he is Travis, a Missouri pilgrim who was arrested earlier this year after entering the country on foot.
He sat up on a bed in a room with unkempt walls, surrounded by reporters, and claimed that despite being imprisoned, he had received good treatment. He claimed not to be a journalist and refused to give his last name.
According to the video, the missing man might be 43-year-old American journalist Austin Tice, who vanished in Syria in 2012 a few days after turning 31. A source close to Tice’s family told NBC News that they do not think the video is of their missing son, despite the fact that hopes for his release have increased after President Bashar-al Assad’s administration was destroyed.
The man who spoke to NBC News Foreign Correspondent Matt Bradley was seen in the video lying on the same bed on the floor as another man. He is identified as the American journalist and claims that a local guard found him barefoot in the town of Dhiyabia, which is outside of the Syrian capital Damascus, early on Thursday morning. He was being treated well.
The man, who identified himself as Travis, told NBC News that he had been reading the scripture extensively before choosing to traverse the mountains from Lebanon into Syria after being found in Dhiyabia. Despite the reporters crowded around him and his ordeal, he seemed unconcerned.
He responded that he was actually OK here and could handle further inquiries when one man persisted in demanding that he take him to the security of American custody.
The individual claimed to have visited Europe before starting his pilgrimage and to have crossed into Syria from Lebanon in late May before being apprehended by a border patrol.
Earlier this year, authorities in the capital of Hungary and Missouri filed missing person reports for a man named Pete Timmerman. Hungarian police identified him as Travis Pete Timmerman.
Timmerman disappeared from Budapest, Hungary, on May 28th, less than seven months ago, according to a public awareness notice from the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
In an appeal for information, authorities in Budapest had identified the 29-year-old Timmerman as Travis Pete Timmerman. They claimed that there was no evidence of him since he was last seen in a church and had subsequently departed for an unidentified location.
Chantal Da Silva reported from London, and Matt Bradley from Damascus.
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