The nonprofit group Hostage Aid Worldwide, one of the teams looking for U.S. journalist Austin Tice in Syria, said Tuesday it believes he is still alive.
"We have data that Austin is alive till January 2024, but the president of the U.S. said in August that he is alive, and we are sure that he is alive today," said Nizar Zakka, president of Hostage Aid Worldwide, according to Agence France-Presse.
"We are trying to be as transparent as possible and to share as much information as possible," he told a news conference Tuesday in Damascus but did not offer information on where Tice might be.
Earlier this week, Roger Carstens, the U.S. hostage envoy, said a network of secret prisons run by the former Syrian government is more extensive than the U.S. had realized and is complicating efforts to find Tice.
The U.S. government initially estimated Syria had about 10 to 20 secret prisons, but there may be 40 or more, Carstens told reporters Friday following a brief trip to Damascus, the Syrian capital.
"I've been rather amazed at the amount of secret prisons that Assad seems to have amassed," Carstens said. "They're in little clusters at times. Sometimes they're in the far reaches of Damascus."
The scale of the prison network has made it hard to locate Tice, according to Carstens.
Not seen since 2012
Tice, 43, was working for Agence France-Presse, McClatchy News, The Washington Post, CBS and other media outlets in Syria.
A Texas native and former U.S. Marine, Tice has been held in Syria since 2012, when he was detained at a checkpoint in Damascus. Aside from a brief video after his capture, little has been heard or seen of him.
Over the past 12 years, the U.S. government has pinpointed about six prisons where Tice was believed to have likely been, Carstens said. But new information means as many as three more facilities have been added to the list.
Limited resources make checking them a difficult endeavor, Carstens said. In the absence of sufficient U.S. government personnel on the ground, nongovernmental organizations, journalists and Syria's transitional government have been searching for Tice.
"In a perfect world, we'll find Austin and bring him home, and we'll stop the search," Carstens said. "We're not going to stop until we find the information we need to conclude what has happened to Austin, where he is, to return him home to his family."
Assad's ouster raises hope
In the aftermath of the Assad government's collapse this month, thousands of prisoners have been released from facilities run by the government. That has raised hopes among the Tice family that Austin will be among them.
"I feel like we're standing in line, and we're not the only ones that are still standing in line," Tice's mother, Debra Tice, told reporters on Monday. "We just need to get all those prisons opened, get all those families reunited, including us."
Tice is the longest-held American journalist abroad.
Shortly before the Assad government fell, the Tice family revealed that it had received information from a source vetted by the U.S. government that confirmed Austin was alive and held in the Damascus area.
