A former Taliban commander convicted of taking a New York Times reporter and two Afghan nationals hostage in 2008 and providing support to fighters who killed three U.S. servicemembers was sentenced to 42 years in prison by a Manhattan judge Tuesday.
The term was handed down to Haji “Najib” Najibullah, more than a year after his April 2025 guilty plea to orchestrating the kidnapping of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Rohde and aiding acts of terrorism.
Manhattan Federal Judge Katherine Polk Failla said the violent kidnapping of Rohde and the two other victims was “extraordinary in its casual brutality” and dehumanization. Rohde and the men he was abducted with managed to escape a compound in the tribal districts of Pakistan after seven months in captivity.
The judge said Najibullah was culpable for a fatal attack on a U.S. military convoy in 2008, regardless of his direct involvement, because he commanded some of the Taliban fighters who carried it out.
Killed during the convoy incident were Sgts. First Class Matthew L. Hilton and Joseph A. McKay, and Sgt. Mark Palmateer and their 21-year-old Afghan interpreter, Muhammad Fahim. Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Sam Adelsberg said at least one of the victims’ bodies was mutilated in the “notably vicious” attack.
“He commanded the troops,” the judge said. “I don’t think Mr. Najibullah needed to pull the trigger; I don’t think he needed to decapitate a body to be culpable for what happened.”
Failla took an hour to reflect on how much time to impose after an almost daylong sentencing hearing that included remarks from Rohde, the Justice Department, Najibullah and his attorney.
In emotional comments, Rohde said he felt Najibullah continued to shirk responsibility, dishonesty he said was present throughout his seven-month captivity.
“The one constant was his lies. He lied to get us to interview. Lied to us throughout our kidnapping,” the journalist said. “Hostage-taking is a cruel and cowardly crime.”
Rohde described his dogged pursuit of the story as a wartime correspondent in Afghanistan as his life’s greatest regret.
“It was a huge mistake to go to this interview,” he said. “I spent seven months talking to Hostage No. 2, in particular, about what a mistake it was — letting our ambition and desire to get a story lead us to make this terrible decision. It was the biggest mistake of my life. I will always regret it.”
Now an author and senior national security reporter at MSNOW, Rohde said Najibullah had, on top of everything else, slandered him as a spy during his abduction. Yet, the journalist said, he had pursued an interview in good faith, “to hear the other side of a conflict. To understand their hopes, their lives and their worldview.”
Rohde has become a staunch advocate for Americans taken hostage or otherwise wrongfully imprisoned, work the judge commended him for in her remarks.
Najibullah, 50, was extradited to the U.S. in 2020 following his arrest in Ukraine. In a statement, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said Najibullah had at last faced justice for the “brutal hostage-taking of innocent civilians and the killing of U.S. servicemembers in Afghanistan.”
The 42-year term will see Najibullah imprisoned into his nineties. But the judge did not impose the life sentence requested by prosecutors, referencing, in part, the man’s circumstances growing up in a nation besieged by violence, what his family of seven children had experienced under the Taliban, and the harsh conditions he’d endured in prison.
Failla said she had spent “several thousand hours” reflecting on arguments in the case that was before her for some six years.
She heard impassioned arguments from defense attorney Andrew Dalack, who implored her to consider Najibullah’s crimes in the context of the brutal, 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan and the former commander’s horrific upbringing in the Middle Eastern nation.
Dalack said his client was a low-level commander, who, despite the bravado he had shown in the past, was never a prominent figure in the Taliban. He said Najibullah was the only native Pashtun Afghan Taliban member ever to be prosecuted in a U.S. court — making the distinction that war had come to him, not the other way around.
The attorney said Najibullah had never once expressed antipathy or anger toward the U.S. and that he had been well-behaved during his time in custody, noting that when the government accidentally shared classified information with him, he kept the secrets to himself.
“He’s not the totally dangerous terrorist that the government is painting him out to be,” Dalack said.
In his comments to the court, Najibullah apologized to Rohde and his family, saying he “deeply” regretted the pain he had caused, in particular to Rohde’s wife.
However, he deflected responsibility for the deaths of the U.S. service members in the convoy attack, saying young Americans and Afghans had been “sacrificed by the bad policies made by powerful men in American leadership and Taliban leadership.”
The convicted Taliban commander, who wore a black kufi cap and beige prison clothing to the proceeding, said he’d been incarcerated before his time in the U.S., but said nothing compared to it.
“The guards here are also cruel,” he said. “They have called me awful names, insulted my religion and have humiliated me with their strip searches. I have been in jail before, but nothing compared to my experience at the Metropolitan Correctional Center New York and Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn.”
