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| Arabia |
| Yemen: Kidnappers up stakes in German hostage negotiations |
| 2008-12-19 |
| (AKI) - Yemeni tribesmen who kidnapped three Germans have added the release of a jailed cleric to their previous demands, tribal mediators said on Thursday. The mediators said the kidnappers' leader Sheik Abed Rabbo Saleh al-Tam told them he wants the release of Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who was sentenced to 75 years in prison in the US for supporting terrorism. Chief kidnapper al-Tam earlier demanded authorities release his son and brother from jail, where they are serving terms for abducting five Yemeni engineers and holding them captive for six months last year. Al-Tam has also reportedly demanded that the Yemeni government pay him 200,000 dollars compensation for a property in Sanaa whose ownership he disputed with an influential businessman. The hostages - a couple and their adult daughter - are reported to be in good health. The tribal mediators said they met on Wednesday with the kidnappers, who are are all tribesmen from the powerful Bani Dhabyan tribe. Yemeni security forces are reported to have completely surrounded the kidnappers' hideout in a mountain village some 60 kilometres east of Sanaa, where they are holding the Germans captive. The German embassy is said to have received assurances from the Yemeni government that force will not be used to free the hostages. The hostages are a female employee of the German Technical Cooperation agency GTZ who works in Yemen and her parents. The kidnappers reportedly snatched the family from their car on Sunday at gunpoint outside the historic city of Radaa located in a remote area 130 kilometres southeast of the capital, Sanaa Yemen's tribes have abducted over 200 foreigners in the impoverished country over the past 15 years in a bid to extract concessions from the central government, whose rule is hard to impose in lawless rural areas. Most foreigners abducted by disgruntled tribesmen in Yemen have been released unharmed, including a German diplomat and his family held for five days in December 2005. However, four Western tourists died in 1998 during a botched attempt to free them from their Islamist militant captors in Yemen's southern Abyan governorate. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 SAN'A, Yemen – Kidnappers released on Friday three Germans abducted in Yemen after the Yemeni government paid a $100,000 ransom and agreed to another demand to release tribesmen from prison, officials and a mediator said. The Germans — an aid worker and her visiting mother and father — arrived in the capital San'a after their release and met with Yemen's ministers of tourism and interior as well as Germany's deputy ambassador to Yemen, Yemeni security officials said. The mediators had said the kidnappers' leader, Sheik Abed Rabbo Saleh al-Tam, had also demanded the release of a cleric, Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, jailed in the United States on terrorism charges. Al-Moayad was sentenced in 2005 in New York to 75 years in prison for supporting terrorism. In October, an appeals court overturned his conviction and ordered a retrial because of inflammatory testimony about unrelated terrorism cases in his first trial. The demand to release al-Moayad was in addition others made by al-Tam for the release of his son and brother from Yemeni jails. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2008-12-19 18:46 |