Tangled Tale of American Found in Afghanistan

He asked for their protection, saying that he had been abducted by the Taliban and held for months but had finally managed to escape, according to Western officials in Kabul.

That is one version of his story.

It is not the one told by local villagers, elders and Taliban in the Zheri District of Kandahar. They say that he sought out the Taliban and was treated less as a hostage than as a supporter, and that he openly traveled with them on motorcycles around the district. A tall African-American, he cut an unmistakable figure, they said.

Much remains mysterious about the man, identified as Takuma Owuo-Hagood, not least his motivations for going to Afghanistan. The Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Mr. Owuo-Hagood entered the country June 23, a little more than three months before he surfaced.

He is now back home, in the Atlanta area. Family members reached there said Mr. Owuo-Hagood, a 25-year-old husband and father, was a baggage handler for Delta with business aspirations. They said that he had tried to make money traveling to China and Turkey to buy clothes for resale back home, and that he had been drawn to Afghanistan by revelations of its untapped mineral wealth.

“He thought that might be a good place to seek out business opportunities,” said his father, Mikell Hagood, asserting in a telephone interview that his son had not been a willing guest of the Taliban.

“I am just happy that he is back home and praying that he got some valuable lessons from this,” Mr. Hagood added. “And praying there will be good coming out of it.”

Western officials in Kabul say they remain uncertain of Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s motivations. An internal memorandum circulating among Western officials cautiously says that Mr. Owuo-Hagood “traveled to Kandahar and was then ‘abducted’ and held for several weeks.”

“On Oct. 2,” it continues, “he ‘escaped’ and flagged down U.S. forces in RC-South.”

The American Embassy would say little other than to confirm that a private American citizen sought assistance from United States forces on Oct. 2 in southern Afghanistan and that the embassy flew him to Kabul and returned him to the United States.

“We are pleased that this individual has been safely reunited with his family,” said Caitlin Hayden, the embassy spokeswoman. “We do not feel it is appropriate to provide further details.”

Ms. Hayden said she could not say whether he had been in custody.

After arriving in Kabul, Mr. Owuo-Hagood made a call to his family. But after weeks without any further word, the family contacted the State Department, his father said.

“They said they would look for him,” he said. “I was praying for the best and fearing the worst.”

Mr. Owuo-Hagood apparently went to Kandahar in late June or early July and found his way to a bazaar held each week on the outer perimeter of Kandahar airbase. He befriended a merchant from the Taliban-held districts west of Kandahar city, according to both a local government official and a Taliban commander. It is unclear whether he actually went into the bazaar, which is within the base’s perimeter or met the merchant just outside.

He asked the merchant to take him to the Taliban and the merchant hid him under a burqa and then put him in a vehicle with at least two burqa-clad women and drove away.

“We heard from elders and villagers that he left the airport with an Afghan colleague from Pashmoul in Zheri District,” said Haji Agha Lalai, a member of the Kandahar provincial council who is from Panjwaj District, adjacent to Zheri. “The American went in a burqa with women so that he could not be seen.”

“First they went to the colleague’s house in Pashmoul and then they went into the Taliban,” he said.

Mr. Owuo-Hagood’s rationale for seeking out the Taliban is hard to gauge; it is also unclear whether he was motivated by ideological or other reasons.

The Taliban were excited and even boastful about his arrival in their midst in Zheri District, an area that Gen. David H. Petraeus described recently as an entrenched Taliban safe haven.

A Taliban commander from the area, who is related to several of the Taliban who lived with Mr. Owuo-Hagood, said that the visitor said he was a convert to Islam.