SANAA: Yemen’s Interior Ministry said yesterday it has expanded the search for six Western hostages and their kidnappers to three provinces surrounding the volatile northwestern province of Saada where they were abducted five days ago.
Yemen’s religious leaders yesterday condemned the hostage taking and the murder of aid workers. “It is an evil crime to kidnap people and to kill women who work in a hospital to help out fellow human beings,” the leaders said in a statement.
The Interior Ministry raised the reward for information leading to the arrest of the kidnappers to $250,000, just hours after Hassan Manna, governor of Saada province, offered a reward of 5 million rials ($25,000) on Tuesday.
“Security forces in the provinces of Al-Jawf, Amran and Hajjah are now partaking in the search,” the ministry said in a statement. It said police have closed all roads leading to Saada to prevent the kidnappers from moving the hostages.
“No place would be excluded in the pursuit of the kidnappers and murderers even if they are in the depth of the earth,” the statement added. It said security bodies were using “every means at their disposal to capture the kidnappers as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile, thousands of people took to the streets of Saada yesterday to protest the kidnapping of nine foreign aid workers and the later killing of three of the hostages, witnesses said.
Authorities dispatched more of police and army troopers backed by military helicopters to Saada as the search continued for a British engineer, a German technician, his wife and their three children, whose fate remains unknown.
The six were kidnapped along with two German nurses and a South Korean woman teacher while on an excursion north of Saada.
