WASHINGTON — U.S. officials have developed specific and highly credible information indicating that a U.S. citizen who disappeared seven years ago while traveling in Syria has died, the man’s daughter said Saturday.
Maryam Kamalmaz said in an interview with The Associated Press that during a meeting this month in Washington with eight senior U.S. officials, she received detailed information about the suspected death of her father, Majd, a psychotherapist from Texas.
Officials told her that on a scale of one to 10, their confidence level about her father’s death was a “high nine.” She said she asked whether other detained Americans had ever been successfully recovered despite such credible information. said no.
“What else do I need? That was a lot of senior officials we needed to confirm to us that he is really gone. There was no way around it,” said Maryam Kamalmaz.
She said officials told her they believe the death occurred years ago, early in her father’s captivity. In 2020, she said, officials told the family they had reason to believe he had died of heart failure in 2017, but the family held out hope and U.S. officials continued their pursuit.
But she said: “It wasn’t until this meeting that they really confirmed to us how credible the information is and the different levels of (verification) it had to go through.”
She did not describe the intelligence she learned.
A White House spokesman declined to comment Saturday. The FBI’s Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell issued a statement that did not provide any updates on Kamalmaz, but said that no matter how much time has passed, it continues to work “on behalf of the victims and their families to recover all American hostages and support the families. whose loved ones are held captive or missing.”
Majd Kamalmaz disappeared in February 2017 at the age of 59 while traveling through Syria to visit an elderly relative. The FBI has said he was stopped at a Syrian government checkpoint in a Damascus suburb and has not been heard from since.
Kamalmaz is one of several Americans who have disappeared in Syria, including journalist Austin Tice, who went missing in 2012 at a checkpoint in a disputed area west of Damascus. Syria has publicly denied that it is holding Americans captive.
In 2020, in the final months of the Trump administration, senior officials visited Damascus for a high-level meeting to negotiate the release of the Americans. But the meeting proved fruitless, as the Syrians failed to provide information about their lives and made demands that U.S. officials deemed unreasonable. U.S. officials have said they continue to try to bring Tice home.
The New York Times first reported on the suspected death of Majd Kamalmaz.