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player ready...A former German ambassador to Washington and four members of his family were reported missing and apparently kidnapped Wednesday while vacationing in a remote part of Yemen. It was the latest in a string of tourist abductions in the Arabian desert.
Juergen Chrobog, ambassador from 1995 to 2001, his wife and three adult sons were declared missing by the German Foreign Ministry. In Yemen, government officials said the family had been taken hostage by tribesmen who seize Western tourists as bargaining chips in dealings with the government, according to news service reports from San’a, the capital.
Chrobog, 65, served as Germany’s deputy foreign minister until last month, when a new government came to power. In 2003, he was instrumental in winning the release of 14 European hostages — nine of them Germans — who had been kidnapped in the Sahara and held for six months by Islamic radicals.
According to the magazine Der Spiegel and other German media, Chrobog delivered a ransom worth several million dollars to intermediaries in Bamako, Mali, in exchange for the hostages’ safe return.
Two Austrians and two Swiss were abducted in –Yemen in the past two months. All were freed unharmed a few days later.
The German Foreign Ministry had posted a travel advisory for Yemen, warning visitors they could be abducted by ransom-seeking tribesmen and also noting a general risk of terrorist attacks against Western interests in the country.
Yemeni officials said Chrobog and his family arrived in the country Saturday at the invitation of the former Yemeni ambassador to Germany.
In Berlin, the German government activated a task force to coordinate handling of the case, said Martina Nibbeling-Wriessnig, a spokeswoman for the German Embassy in Washington. The German government recently disbanded a similar task force dealing with a hostage crisis in Iraq. Susanne Osthoff, a German archeologist and activist, was released Dec. 18, three weeks after being abducted by an unknown group.
The Osthoff case and that of the 14 tourists kidnapped in the Sahara prompted grumbling from some German lawmakers that adventurous Germans should be held financially responsible for their rescues.
Chrobog did not share that view. “I think we should just be happy that the situation had ended like this,” he said on Aug. 20, 2003, a day after he helped to achieve the safe release of the Sahara travelers.”