Three More Foreigners Freed
from the big bust of eight foreigners on charges of running guns to Somalia, seven of whom had confessed according to earlier reports from the Yemeni government. The larger question may be, is the regime sincerely attempting to co-opt the extremists or have extremists already co-opted substantial elements of the regime.
Yahoo: Yemen has freed six of eight foreigners arrested for alleged links with Al-Qaeda and smuggling weapons to Islamists in Somalia, keeping only an Austrian and a Somali in custody.
A Briton, a Dane and an Australian were released on Wednesday for lack of sufficient evidence implicating them in the purported arms smuggling, a security source told AFP on Friday.
Two Australians among the group detained in mid-October were freed last Saturday.
A German man in the group had been released on November 2.
This leaves one Austrian and one Somali in custody.
A security source last month gave a slightly different account of the detainees’ nationalities, saying they were four Australians, a Dane, a Briton, a German and a Somali. No mention was made of an Austrian.
A Yemeni official said in late October that the men “were arrested in two flats in Sanaa on October 14 on suspicion of affiliation to Al-Qaeda and smuggling weapons to the Islamic courts militia in Somalia.”
Initial interrogation of the foreigners, who had been in the Yemeni capital ostensibly to study Arabic, “showed their involvement in smuggling arms to Somalia” from Yemen, he said.
Yemen, site of a number of terror attacks in recent years, has since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States worked with Washington to clamp down on suspected Al-Qaeda sympathizers.
Somalia’s Islamists, the two-year-old government and their Ethiopian allies have been bracing for all-out war for weeks in the lawless Horn of Africa nation that many fear could engulf the entire region.
