‘Secret’ U.S. Hostage Held by Taliban Identified as Paul Overby

As The Daily Beast first reported one year ago, a group of Taliban-aligned Islamist militants had been holding an American man hostage for more than a year. At the time, The Beast withheld the hostage’s name at the request of his family and law-enforcement officials. On Thursday, the family identified to The News International that the hostage is 74-year-old author Paul Overby, who went missing in Afghanistan’s Khost province in May 2014 after traveling to the region to interview Sirajuddin Haqqani—son of the well-known Afghan mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and leader of the terrorist Haqqani network—in the hopes of completing a book explaining the Afghan conflict from both sides.