Three Al-Qaeda fugitives surrender after jailbreak [Archives:2006/924/Front Page]

SANA'A, Feb. 26 ) Three of 23 suspected Al-Qaeda militants who escaped from a prison in Yemen early this month have surrendered and contacts are under way with other prisoners to persuade them to follow suit. President Ali Abdullah Saleh in an interview published yesterday in the Saudi-owned Pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat newspaper said that security forces were in contact with the other fugitives and negotiating their surrender. However, he did not give any details about the escapees that had surrendered.

“There are contacts with the escapees, and some of them surrendered to security authorities,”

“So far three (have turned themselves in), and there are contacts with the remainder, who are inside (the country). They have not left Yemen,” he added.

The President confirmed that the fugitives want to give themselves up and most of them have finished the majority of their sentence already. The Yemeni government has offered a reward of more than 25,000 dollars for information that could lead to the capture of any of the suspected Al-Qaeda militants who broke out of a Sana'a prison on Feb. 3, embarrassing the authorities and angering the United States.

The fugitives include the leaders of the 2000 bombing of the U.S. warship Cole and the 2002 attack on the French supertanker Limburg, as well as a Yemeni-American wanted by the United States.
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