SANAA: Yemeni security forces continued their search yesterday for six of the nine abducted foreigners as authorities offered a reward of $25,000 for information leading to the kidnappers thought to have killed three hostages.
The mortal remains of the three victims were transferred to Sanaa by a military helicopter yesterday ahead of repatriation to their home countries. Three women were found dead in northern Yemen this week, in a rare killing that comes as separatist and militant tensions intensify in a country whose instability has alarmed Western countries and neighbors.
The reward of five million rials ($24,910) from Hassan Al-Manna, governor of Saada province where the nine were seized last week, was announced on state news agency Saba. Officials said the search was going on in districts of Nushur, Aushash, Al-Farea, Al-Kutaf and Al-Sadr, east of Saada.
An influential tribal leader said hundreds of tribesmen and ordinary citizens were also participating in the search. “An army of people are taking part in the search operation,” Sheikh Fayez Al-Awjari, who is also member of Parliament, said. Saba said on Monday the three were part of a group of nine — seven Germans, a Briton and a Korean — that included three children and their mother, who were kidnapped last week in the mountainous Saada region.
A source said on Sunday that one of the German captives was a doctor at a local hospital which the other Germans were visiting. The Briton is an engineer and the South Korean was working with an aid agency. Two of the dead women were German nurses and one was a Korean teacher, the Yemeni military said.
If the killing was carried out by tribal forces, it would mark the first time that women hostages have been victims. Two Belgian women, however, were killed in 2008 by gunmen in an ambush that authorities blamed on Al-Qaeda.
One analyst said the killings bear the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda but no claim of responsibility has been has been made. Yemen says it arrested last week a man described as Al-Qaeda’s top financer in Yemen.
Yemen is struggling with a revolt in the north, a secessionist movement in the south and growing Al-Qaeda militancy. The unrest has raised concerns Yemen could slip into chaos and provide a base of operations for Al-Qaeda or pirates operating in the Indian Ocean
Yemen has blamed the Houthi group for kidnapping the nine foreigners, a charge the Houthis denied. The first group of German investigators arrived in Sanaa yesterday to take part in the investigation being carried out by Yemeni authorities, a police official told Arab News.
However, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said yesterday Germany “has to assume” two German women taken hostage are dead. Steinmeier said the German Embassy in Sanaa had dispatched a staff member to northern Yemen where three dead bodies were recovered on Monday, near to the place where the nine hostages kidnapped last week were last seen. “We unfortunately have to assume that two German women who had been missing are among the dead,” he told reporters in Berlin.
“Our thoughts and sympathies are with the victims’ loved ones and friends.” He said it was not clear how the women had died but that German forensics experts had been sent to Yemen to examine the bodies. “Naturally we condemn this act in the strongest possible terms,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters. The Brake Bible School in Lemgo, Germany, said the two women were third-year students there, and that they had been doing work experience for the Worldwide Services relief group at a hospital in Saada since the start of June.
— With input from agencies
