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Popular Podcast ‘Serial’ Is Back With Mystery Of U.S Soldier Bowe Bergdahl

Award-winning podcast Serial is back for a second series, this time focusing on alleged U.S. army deserter Bowe Bergdahl who spent five years in Taliban captivity after vanishing from his post in Afghanistan.

The first episode of the highly anticipated podcast - a spin-off from radio programme This American Life - landed early on Thursday morning.

Serial became an international sensation in 2014 when the first season covered the 1999 murder of 18-year-old Baltimore student Hae Min Lee and the seemingly shaky conviction of Lee’s ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed.

Syed’s case was re-opened last month to include new evidence that wasn’t admitted in his previous trial.

Bowe Bergdahl has been charged with desertion (United States Army)

Just like the first series, Serial’s second season promises to deliver a fresh look at a baffling case.

In a blog post, Serial presenter Sarah Koenig explained:

“Our first season was about a murder case few people had heard about. Season Two is a story a gazillion people have heard about: the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who walked off his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured and held by the Taliban for nearly five years”.

Following his incarceration by the Taliban, Bergdahl was returned to the U.S. in return for five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. He was later charged with desertion.

Unlike Have Min Lee’s murder, the Bergdahl case is still under military investigation and has seen the soldier branded by some as a ‘traitor’.

Koenig said: “Unlike our story in Season One, this one extends far out into the world. It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantanamo policy. What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I’d thought I more or less understood, but really didn’t: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished”.