David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban, escaped on Friday night and made his way to freedom after more than seven months of captivity in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Rohde, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal, was abducted outside Kabul, Afghanistan, on November 10 while he was researching a book. Rohde was part of The Times’s reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize this spring for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan last year.

Rohde told his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, that Ludin joined him in climbing over the wall of a compound where they were being held in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. They made their way to a nearby Pakistani Frontier Corps base and on Saturday they were flown to the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan. “They just walked over the wall of the compound,” Mulvihill said. The driver, Mangal, did not escape with the other two men. The initial report was that Rohde was in good health, while Ludin injured his foot in the escape.

Until now, the kidnapping has been kept quiet by The Times and other media organisations out of concern for the men’s safety. “From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. “The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organisations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.”

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