WASHINGTON:

US President Donald Tump’s administration has warned of imposing bounties on top Afghan Taliban leaders over American hostages in the war-ravaged country.

Taking a strict stance on the issue in a post on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported. If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on [Osama] bin Laden”.

The threat comes days after the Afghan Taliban government and the US swapped prisoners in one of the final acts of former president Joe Biden.

The new top US diplomat issued the harsh warning via social media, in a rhetorical style strikingly similar to his boss, President Donald Trump.

Rubio did not describe who the other Americans may be, but there have long been accounts of missing Americans whose cases were not formally taken up by the US government as wrongful detentions.

Hard-line stance

Trump is known for brandishing threats in his speeches and on social media. But he is also a critic of US military interventions overseas and in his second inaugural address Monday said he aspired to be a “peacemaker.”

In his first term, the Trump administration broke a then-taboo and negotiated directly with the Taliban — with Trump even proposing a summit with the then-insurgents at the Camp David presidential retreat — as he brokered a deal to pull US troops and end America’s longest war

William McKenty, an American

Also freed was William McKenty, an American about whom little information has been released.

The US in turn freed Khan Mohammed, who was serving a life sentence in a California prison.

Mohammed was convicted of trafficking heroin and opium into the United States and was accused of seeking rockets to kill US troops in Afghanistan.