Washington D.C. – NBC, November 13, 2024
Two Somali men who prosecutors called pirates were sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday in the 2012 kidnapping of an American journalist who was held hostage for over two years.
Abdi Yusuf Hassan and Mohamed Tahlil Mohamed — who had positions in Somalia’s government — were “key players” in the abduction of journalist Michael Scott Moore, said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Moore was in Somalia investigating piracy when men with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed his vehicle and took him hostage on Jan. 21, 2012, officials said.
He was held hostage for 977 days as the pirates demanded a ransom, and at one point he was transferred to a boat that had been taken over by pirates and whose slain captain was kept in a freezer, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
