SANAA, Yemen (AP) – Al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen threatened an American hostage kidnapped over a year ago, giving Washington three days to meet unspecified demands in a new video released Thursday.
The hostage, identified as 33-year-old Luke Somers, an American photojournalist born in Britain, is shown for the first time in the video, which was posted on the al-Qaida offshoot’s Twitter account. The video comes weeks after an apparent unsuccessful attempt by U.S. special forces to rescue Somers in a raid in the remote Yemeni desert.
The footage apparently seeks to mimic hostage videos released by al-Qaida’s rivals from the Islamic State group, which has threatened – and later beheaded – several American and British hostages in the aftermath of a summer blitz that captured much of Iraq and Syria. The IS fighters have at times battled al-Qaida and prompted defections among their rivals.
Somers was kidnapped in September 2013 from a street in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, where he had worked as a freelancer for the Yemen Times. Since his capture, Yemeni journalists have been holding sit-ins in Sanaa to press the government to seek his release.
Somers was likely among a group of hostages who were the objective of a joint rescue mission by U.S operation forces and Yemeni troops last month that freed eight captive in a remote area of dunes called Hagr al-Saiaar near the Saudi border in Hadramawt province.