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.
BEIRUT: Thousands of people converged Saturday on central Beirut to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri.Waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader, men, women and children gathered under sunny skies in Martyr's Square where members of the parliamentary majority were to address the crowd. The rally comes as final preparations are underway in The Hague for the launch of the international tribunal set up to bring Hariri's killers to justice. It also comes as the country prepares for legislative elections in June that will pit Western-backed political parties against a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Syria and Iran.Hariri died in a massive car bombing on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 others. The assassination was widely blamed on then Lebanese power-broker Syria, which has denied any involvement. The attack on the Beirut seafront was one of the worst acts of political violence to rock Lebanon since t...
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