Trump has just announced that his administration, working in tandem with the UAE, has freed an American hostage in the country of Yemen.
Here’s the announcement:
It is my honor today to announce that Danny Burch, a United States citizen who has been held hostage in Yemen for 18 months, has been recovered and reunited with his wife and children. I appreciate the support of the United Arab Emirates in bringing Danny home...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2019
...Danny’s recovery reflects the best of what the United States & its partners can accomplish.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2019
We work every day to bring Americans home. We maintain constant and intensive diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement cooperation within the United States Government and with...
...our foreign partners. Recovering American hostages is a priority of my Admin, and with Danny’s release, we have now secured freedom for 20 American captives since my election victory. We will not rest as we continue our work to bring the remaining American hostages back home!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 25, 2019
This is great news! Trump has clearly put a priority on freeing American hostages held in other countries. We’ve now seen this play out time and time again.
In case you aren’t familiar with Danny Burch, he has been held hostage since 2017, indicated from this NY Times article written in September of that year:
An American oil worker was abducted from his car by unidentified gunmen on a busy street in the Yemeni capital, his wife and colleagues said on Monday.
The American, Danny Lavone Burch, 63, had spent years in Yemen working as an engineer at a Yemeni oil company when he was abducted on Saturday morning.
“They did it in broad daylight in front of everyone,” Nadia Forsa, Mr. Burch’s wife, said by phone from Sana, the capital.
“I knew that something was wrong,” she said.
The police later told her that witnesses said he had been stopped on a busy street in Sana by five armed men in civilian clothes who drove a pickup truck with no license plates.
After they took Mr. Burch away, two of them parked his car on a side street, where Ms. Forsa later found it, she said.
“When I saw the car, my heart fell,” she said.
She told the couple’s sons that their father was traveling and that she looked upset because he had not told her ahead of time. “I don’t want to ruin their lives,” she said.
The abduction took place in a part of Yemen that is tightly controlled by the Houthis and where Al Qaeda is not believed to have an active presence.
I’m very glad this long saga is over for him and that he’s been reunited with this family.
A great success for the Trump administration!