Reports: Fijian Golan hostages freed
September 11, 2014
Unverified reports out of Syria on Thursday strongly suggested that the 45 UN peacekeepers from Fiji taken hostage by the al-Nusra Front terror group had been released. The DPA news agency cited a Syrian activist, who had requested anonymity, as saying that the hostages were now free, with Al Jazeera television reporting the same.
Overnight on Wednesday, a video which appeared to show the hostages was published; in this short video, one hostage, who was not identified, thanked the al-Nusra Front for their impending release using the group's full formal name.
"By the way, we are all safe and alive, and we thank Jabhat al-Nusra for keeping us safe and keeping us alive. I'd like to assure you that we have not been harmed in any way," the hostage said in the video, carried the intelligence monitoring agency SITE. "We understand that with the limited resources that they have, they have provided the best for us and we truly appreciate it and we thank them."
From the footage, it was not possible to tell whether the soldier was speaking under duress. Fiji confirmed that the video did show its soldiers, but did not comment on their captivity or reported release.
Prior to the soldier speaking, two men speaking Arabic describe their version of what took place in the run-up to the August 28 kidnapping. They said that they promised not to hurt the UN peacekeepers, saying that they were hoping to arrange a prisoner swap.
A UN source had told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday, again on condition of anonymity, that the publication of such a video was one of al-Nusra's terms in negotiations for the hostages' release.
The Golan Heights are a formerly Syrian area controlled largely by Israel since a 1973 war; neutral UN peacekeepers have patrolled the region ever since. However, gains made by Syrian rebel fighters in the country's civil war have put control of the Syrian side of the region under dispute.
A separate group of UN peacekeepers from the Philippines were also captured, but the government in Manila said on August 31 that they had escaped.
msh/sb (AFP, AP, dpa)