Tuesday, June 16, 2009 SANA’A: Nine missing foreigners – including three children – in Yemen have all turned up dead, said a Yemeni official Monday, apparently executed by their kidnappers.The nine foreigners, including seven German nationals, a Briton and a South Korean, disappeared last week while on a picnic in the restive northern Saada region of Yemen.The bodies were found by the son of a tribal leader in Noshour, east of the volatile Saada mountainous area of northern Yemen where the nine were abducted, the official said.The authorities had accused Shiite Zaidi rebels in Saada of seizing seven Germans, a British engineer and a South Korean woman teacher. The rebels denied the charge.The nine – among them three German children and two women nurses – belong to an international relief group that has worked at a hospital in Saada province for 35 years, an official said Sunday.There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the kidnapping – the latest in a string of abductions of foreigners in Yemen. In Berlin Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could not confirm the report of deaths of hostages.“We know of this information. We are pressing ahead for examination of this information. For the moment, I cannot give any confirmation,” she said.South Korea’s foreign ministry also said it had no information and was checking the report. Seoul had confirmed that a 34-year-old South Korean identified only by her family name Eom had been missing in yemen since Thursday evening.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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