10:39am UK, Tuesday December 04, 2001

The mother of the young American man captured fighting for the Taliban claims he must have been brainwashed by forces loyal to Osama bin Laden.

His father says his son has been misunderstood and is "a really good boy".

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Twenty-year-old John Phillip Walker was caught after a bloody prison uprising at a fortress near Mazar-e-Sharif that left one American CIA agent and hundreds of Taliban captives dead.

'Impressionable'

He is being held by the US military. Pentagon officials are still determining if he is under arrest or a prisoner of war.

"If he got involved with the Taliban, he must have been brainwashed," his mother, Marily Walker, told Newsweek.

"He was isolated. He didn't know a soul in Pakistan. When you're young and impressionable, it's easy to be led by charismatic people."

Walker's parents said they were shocked by their son's support for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in the September 11 suicide plane attacks on the United States.

'He's a really good boy'

But they have vowed to stand by him and said they had hired lawyers to take up his case.

"I'm proud of John. He's a really good boy. A really sweet boy," said Walker's father, Frank Lindh.

Asked about reports that his son had said he supported the September 11 attacks, Lindh said he did not think his son "was thinking straight at that moment" because of his ordeal in the prison uprising.

"All I can say is that I don't think his mind was working," Mr Lindh said told CNN.

Walker converted from Catholicism to Islam when he was a high school student aged 16, travelling to Yemen the following year to learn Arabic.

He was born in Washington in February 1981, the second of three children of health care worker Mrs Walker and lawyer, Mr Lindh. The couple are now separated.

Named John Phillip Walker Lindh at birth, he later took his mother's last name and in Afghanistan was known as Abdul Hamid.

He spent the first 10 years of his life in the Washington suburbs of Maryland, moving to northern California with his parents in 1991.