 Three British citizens were kidnapped today as they entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt through the Rafah crossing, Palestinian witnesses and security officials said. The hostages are thought to be a man, a woman and their child, according to reports. The woman worked with a local human rights group, a police source told Reuters. | I'll bet we can guess whose rights she was concerned about. |
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Palestinian police said the kidnappers' car was spotted heading north, and that a pursuit was under way. A Foreign Office spokesman was unable to give further details but said UK officials were looking into it.
UPDATE: A British human rights worker and her visiting parents were kidnapped in the Gaza Strip. The 25-year-old woman is understood to have been showing her mother and father around the town of Rafah when they were snatched. "and over there is the market where I shop and, oh look, here are some locals.."
"Honey, why are they shoving us into the boot of their car? |
The Foreign Office confirmed that there had been a kidnapping but their identities and the details of the abduction remained unclear. A spokesman said: "We are in a position to confirm reports of three Britons missing in the Occupied Territories. At this stage we have no further details." It was reported that the woman worked at the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights.
John Strawson, a reader in law at Birzeit University in the West Bank and Middle East expert, said it was likely the trio would be released unharmed. "Unlike in Iraq the kidnappings are not so much aimed at the foreigners themselves as at embarrassing the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and trying to show he has no control over the Gaza Strip," he said. "The main aim is just to demonstrate that no one is safe. I suspect they will be released unharmed - it will be a big change to the situation if anything happened to them."
A spokesman for the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights confirmed that the woman had been working there for two or three months, and had been taken with her parents. He said she was aged 24 and originally from Scotland. It was not known from exactly where in Scotland. But he did not name her and said investigations were continuing into what happened.
The incident is the latest in a series of abductions in Gaza that has undermined attempts by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to establish order in the coastal strip following Israel's withdrawal earlier this year. Militant groups have kidnapped a number of foreigners, usually using them as bargaining tools to get relatives released from Palestinian prisons, secure jobs from the Palestinian Authority or settle personal scores.
Last week, two foreign teachers were kidnapped by Palestinian militants near Gaza City. Gunmen abducted Hendrik Taatgen, a Dutch headteacher at a private American school, and his Australian deputy, Brian Ambrosio, as they left for work. The abductors, who claimed to have ties to the radical PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, demanded the release of an imprisoned militant leader. They later released the captives unharmed.
Meanwhile, armed tribesmen today kidnapped a family of five Germans in eastern Yemen, local security officials and the German government said. The family was seized in al-Irim, Shabwa province, to try to force the government to release members of the tribe al-Abdullah bin Dahha who were arrested after a clash with another tribe. In Berlin, a German Foreign Ministry spokesman said the family, which had been visiting Yemen since Christmas Eve, had disappeared and it was not clear if they had been kidnapped. | When I think Christmas vacation, Yemen tops my list. That'd be the "no way in Hell" list. Gaza ranks 5th, behind Somalia, Sudan and France. |
Tribesmen occasionally kidnap westerners in Yemen, usually to try to force concessions from the government. Hostages are usually released unharmed, but several were killed in 2000 when security forces carried out a botched raid to free them. |
