Q: Several weeks ago there was a short story about two Afghan pilots who disappeared while they were being trained in Georgia to fly planes. What happened with these two soldiers who were about to graduate?
—Michael Jones, Loganville
A: The Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement officials are still searching for Mirwais Kohistani and Shirzad Rohullah, who walked away from their training program at Moody Air Force Base in early December.
Moody Air Force Base is near Valdosta.
“We’re still following electronic and physical leads,” Bryan Cox, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, told Q&A on the News on Thursday. “We’re continuing to look for them.”
Kohistani and Rohullah were a part of a group of 23 Afghan trainees – pilots and mechanics — who had been at Moody since February 2014 and were assigned to the 81st Fighter Squadron.
They were about a week away from graduating and returning to Afghanistan, The New York Times reported.
Their U.S. visas were revoked in December, but Kohistani and Rohullah are not considered a threat, officials have said.
The U.S. and Afghan governments screened both of them before they were accepted into the training and allowed to travel to the United States.
Kohistani and Rohullah were a part of a program to train 30 Afghan pilots and 90 aircraft maintenance personnel through 2018.
Andy Johnston with Fast Copy News Service wrote this column. Do you have a question about the news? We’ll try to get the answer. Call 404-222-2002 or email q&a@ajc.com (include name, phone and city).
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