By Jonathan Landay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -As a crowd looked on, uniformed Taliban surrounded the Toyota Landcruiser in which Mahmood Habibi, a naturalized U.S. citizen, sat. Other Taliban smashed open the door of his Kabul apartment, emerging later with his laptop and papers.

Blindfolded in the back seat, Habibi and his driver were driven off by gunmen sporting shoulder patches of the Taliban's feared secret police, the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), according to several witness statements in U.S. government possession seen by Reuters.

Afghanistan's Taliban government denies it detained Habibi, 37, who was a former head of Afghanistan's civil aviation. While dividing his time between the United States and Kabul working for a private company, he became a U.S. citizen after the Taliban took power in 2021. The Taliban also says they have no knowledge of his whereabouts, three years after he disappeared.

That is contradicted by the witness accounts and other evidence, including data monitored from Habibi's cellphone, described to Reuters by a U.S. official and a former U.S. official familiar with the matter.

The Taliban denials present a conundrum for the FBI, which is leading the U.S. government effort to gain his release; and for the State Department, which describes Habibi's detention a major impediment to exploring increased engagement with Afghanistan, three years after his August 10, 2022 arrest.

U.S. President Donald Trump has made freeing Americans held abroad a top priority and already has secured the release of dozens, including from Afghanistan, Russia and Venezuela.

The case of Habibi - the only publicly identified American held in the country - has been harder to resolve.

This story is the most comprehensive account to date of the circumstances of Habibi's capture and includes previously unreported details.

Among them, interviews with the U.S. official and a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case reveal that the Taliban likely detained Habibi because the CIAhadpenetrated the companywherehe worked.The sources say the U.S. spy agency had accessed one of the company's security cameras, helping it pinpoint the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul guesthouse.

Habibi's detention came 10 days after Zawahiri - the last of the top plotters of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States - was dramatically assassinated by a U.S. drone strike on the guesthouse, ordered by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

At the time, U.S. officials briefed journalists that it was a CIA operation. The U.S. sources told Reuters that Habibi was unaware of the CIA plot and was wrongly detained after returning to Kabul from a work trip to Dubai after the assassination, oblivious of the danger he was in.

The CIA, the Taliban, the White House and Habibi's employer, Virginia-based ARX........

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