Mr. Rohde, Mr. Ludin, who was assisting Mr. Rohde as an interpreter, and Mr. Mangal were abducted on Nov. 10, 2008, outside Kabul during a trip on which Mr. Rohde was to interview a Taliban commander in Logar Province, south of Kabul.
Mr. Rohde has written that the commander he was to interview was called Abu Tayeb, which the indictment says was an alias used by Mr. Najibullah.
Mr. Ludin, in an interview with The Times after his release, said that the commander had granted previous interviews to foreign journalists and had built a degree of trust. Mr. Ludin said the commander had betrayed that trust by directly orchestrating the kidnapping.
After their abduction, Mr. Rohde and the two other hostages, escorted by a half-dozen armed guards, were forced to hike across the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan, the indictment said.
The kidnappers ordered the hostages to make calls and videos seeking help, the authorities said.
At one point, Mr. Najibullah ordered Mr. Rhode to call his wife in New York using a satellite phone, and another time, Mr. Najibullah recorded a video of Mr. Rohde begging for help while the barrel of a machine gun was pointed at his face, according to the indictment.
Mr. Najibullah, whose first name also has been spelled Hajji, was identified in a 2014 Times article as the nominal leader of Feday-e-Mahaz, which has been described as a radical offshoot of the Taliban with a history of targeting journalists. In 2014, the group claimed responsibility for the killing of Nils Horner, a Swedish journalist in Kabul.
Mr. Najibullah was still affiliated with the Taliban during the abduction of Mr. Rohde and his colleagues, though he appears to have later broken away after the Taliban acknowledged that they were exploring the possibility of holding peace talks, The Times reported.
