Taliban denied on Thursday that they are holding Mahmood Shah Habibi, a dual US-Afghan citizen and former head of Afghanistan’s civil aviation authority, in response to a recent US Justice Department reward offer of up to $5 million for information on his whereabouts.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said in a statement that Taliban authorities had investigated the case at the request of Habibi’s family and found no evidence that he was in their custody.
The Justice Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program announced in June that Habibi had disappeared on August 10, 2022, after being taken near his home in Kabul by the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence. His arrest, alongside his driver and 29 colleagues from the Kabul-based Asia Consultancy Group, came shortly after a U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
