Photo of Ravishan Shapirov from the Kyrgyzstan newspaper Vechernii Bishkek

Ravishan Shapirov, an Islamic rebel currently in the custody of the Kyrgyzstan military, may be the kidnapper who was pushed off a 1500-foot cliff in Kyrgyzstan's remote Kara Su Valley by the group of American climbers he was holding hostage.

Jason Smith, 22, Tommy Caldwell, 22, Beth Rodden, 20, and John Dickey, 25, were on a big-wall climbing expedition in the remote Kara Su when they were taken hostage by a man who resembled Shapirov (who identified himself to them as Isuf) and several other members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan on August 12. The story of their six days as hostages and their escape appears in an exclusive report by famed climber and writer Greg Child in the November issue of Outside.

Shapirov's survival was reported in the Russian language Kyrgyz newspaper Vechernii Bishkek. The 20-year old Shapirov, malnourished and suffering from a broken nose and several cracked ribs, was brought into the Southern Front headquarters of the Kyrgyz military for interrogation. He apparently told a military prosecutor that he had taken four alpine climbers hostage—three men and one woman—and that the climbers escaped after pushing him off a cliff. According to the climbers' account of their final hours in captivity, Isuf was leading them on a ridgeline march on August 17 when Caldwell pushed him off the top of a series of rock steps.

The report, which Outside Online has been unable to confirm, included a photograph of Shapirov, which Caldwell has identified as an image of their captor. He expressed relief to discover he's not responsible for anyone's death. "I'm really happy that I didn't end up killing anybody. It's definitely a big weight off my shoulders because I was having a really hard time with that," said Caldwell.

Smith and Dickey remain unconvinced that Isuf is alive. Smith said that he was closest to Isuf as he fell and can't fathom how anyone could have survived the 1500-foot drop. Staring at a faxed copy of the photograph, he had serious doubts that he was looking at a picture of his former kidnapper. "It looks kind of like him but the jaw is totally different. In the photo the guy has a really pointy jaw, and the dude we were with didn't look quite like that. It's really hard to say."

Dickey, after initially feeling certain that the man in the photograph was not Isuf, concedes that their captor would likely look different if he had lived through his fall. "At first when I looked at the picture of the guy, I said that's not him, not even. But we kept looking at it, and it occurred to me that it would be perfectly possible for that to be him, just really fucked up." Rodden stated that she had not looked at the picture, and didn't plan to.

Child sees Shapirov's apparent resurfacing as one more surreal element in this strange and complicated story of war and religion in which the American climbers found themselves. "It made me feel the story was still alive instead of that I'd reported on something that was over and done with. This story is a living thing; the entire story, not just of the climbers but of the conflict. This won't be the last time these borders are invaded by terrorist groups." Read Child's complete account of the climbers' ordeal and its intersection with the situation in Kyrgyzstan in Outside's November issue, available this week.

Michael Roberts is the assistant editor of Outside Online