3 Foreign Women Dead in Yemen, Al-Qaida Suspected

Nine missing foreigners, including women and three children, have all turned up dead in Yemen, a...

Nine missing foreigners, including women and three children, have all turned up dead in Yemen, a Yemeni official said Monday, apparently executed by their kidnappers in the impoverished nation in the Arabian peninsula. In this file photo, Yemeni counter-terrorism forces take part in a training session in Sureif, a suburb of Sanaa.

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Shepherds found the mutilated bodies on Monday of two German nurses and a South Korean teacher who were kidnapped while picnicking in an area of Yemen known as a hideout for al-Qaida.

Experts said the killings bore the hallmarks not of local tribesmen but of jihadist militants who had returned home after fighting in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The dead women disappeared in the remote northern province of Saada Friday while on an outing with six other foreigners, including a German doctor, his wife and their three young children. The whereabouts of the six were unknown, the Yemeni government said.

Yemeni authorities announced a state of high alert in the area and were "conducting extensive searches and investigations," according to a government statement. Besides the German family, a British man was also missing. They all worked for World Wide Services Foundation, a Dutch aid group helping with medical care in the province.

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The incident is the latest attack against foreigners in this impoverished Arab nation on the tip of the Arabian peninsula where al-Qaida has a firm foothold in its remote areas.

The government blamed the kidnapping on a Shiite rebel group that has been leading an uprising in the province for the past several years, but the group denied it had anything to do with it. Initially, Yemeni security officials had reported all nine were killed, but the government later said six were still missing.

Nearly all past fatal attacks against foreigners in Yemen have been by Islamist militants.

"I think that it would have to be outside sources" that carried out the attack, said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, noting that the killings, including reports that the bodies were mutilated, bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida.

The killings "represent a nasty turning point in Yemen," he said.

A tribal leader in the area also blamed al-Qaida for the kidnapping. He spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation.