SANAA, 19 August 2003 — Yemen yesterday extradited to the Kingdom a Saudi national who fled a Najran jail in mid-June with the help of two other Saudis and sneaked into Yemeni territory, police officials said. The Saudi Interior Ministry later confirmed the report.
The officials told Arab News that Jerwan ibn Hamad Al-Abdan, who is believed to be a drug trafficker, was arrested last week in the northeastern Yemeni province of Al-Jawf with another Saudi man, suspected to be one of the two accomplices in the jailbreak.
A Yemeni tribal clan in Al-Jawf, the Al-Mazariq, with whom Al-Abadan has family relations, had been sheltering the two men during the past two months, the officials said on condition of anonymity.
The arrest of the two fugitives took place after an extensive manhunt, the officials said but gave no details of the whereabouts of the third fugitive. Saudi authorities alerted Sanaa of the escape of the three men into Yemeni territories and asked that they be arrested and extradited. Yesterday’s extradition was part of a security swap in which the Kingdom sent to Yemen on Sunday four terror suspects including two linked to last October’s bombing of a French oil supertanker, the Limburg, off the coast of Yemen.
Riyadh handed over eight Yemeni fugitives in July, including two believed to have connections with the Limburg attack and five suspected of involvement in an attack on a US destroyer in the southern harbor of Aden more than two years ago.
Meanwhile, 13 people were killed and 18 others injured when a bus carrying 44 Umrah pilgrims collided with a truck on a highway in northwestern Yemen early yesterday.
The bus, traveling on the main road linking Yemen with Saudi Arabia, turned the wrong way to collide head-on with a truck carrying a shipment of wood, Yemen’s official Saba news agency reported. The driver of the bus was among those killed in the crash. Careless driving, bad road conditions and the poor state of vehicles are responsible for hundreds of accidents on Yemeni highways.
