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2 Hostages Killed in Yemen as U.S. Rescue Effort Fails

Luke Somers, an American photojournalist, in Sana, the Yemeni capital, in 2013. He had been captured by Al Qaeda.Credit...Hani Mohammed/Associated Press

SANA, Yemen — United States commandos stormed a village in southern Yemen early Saturday in an effort to free an American photojournalist held hostage by Al Qaeda, but the raid ended in tragedy, with the kidnappers killing the American and a South African held with him, United States officials said.

The hostages — Luke Somers, an American photojournalist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher — were killed by their captors, militants from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, when they realized the rescue effort was underway. President Obama said he had authorized the operation, led by about three dozen Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos, after concluding that Mr. Somers’s life was in “imminent danger.”

It was the second attempt by United States forces to rescue Mr. Somers from Yemen in less than two weeks. Despite the deaths of the hostages, as well as several Yemeni civilians, President Obama said his administration would not back down from using military power to free its captured citizens.

“As this and previous hostage rescue operations demonstrate, the United States will spare no effort to use all of its military, intelligence and diplomatic capabilities to bring Americans home safely, wherever they are located,” he said in a statement.

The raid Saturday, however, may have doomed an effort by a South African aid group to free Mr. Korkie. Gift of the Givers, a South African relief organization that has projects in Yemen, said it had successfully negotiated Mr. Korkie’s release, and he had been expected to be freed by the militants on Sunday. American officials said they were not aware of those arrangements.

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Supporters of Ali Abdullah Saleh, then Yemen’s president, in 2011. Luke Somers was among those who covered the aftermath of an uprising against Mr. Saleh.Credit...Luke Somers/Demotix, via Corbis

Mr. Somers had been part of a group of freelance journalists who covered the aftermath of Yemen’s 2011 uprising and had stayed on, working as a freelance editor at English-language publications and as a photojournalist. He was kidnapped in September 2013 while walking on a street in Sana, Yemen’s capital. Shortly before his death, Mr. Somers’s family released a video in which they pleaded with his captors to release him, while insisting that they had no prior knowledge of the first rescue attempt.

On Saturday, Mr. Somers’s sister, Lucy Somers, told The Associated Press that F.B.I. agents had notified the family of her brother’s death.

“We ask that all of Luke’s family members be allowed to mourn in peace,” she said.

In the village where the rescue attempt took place, in the southern province of Shabwah, a tribal leader, Tarek al-Daghari al-Awlaki, said the American commandos had raided four houses, killing at least two militants but also eight civilians. He said that one of the civilians killed was a 70-year-old man.

“The shooting caused panic,” Mr. Daghari said. “Nine of the dead are from my tribe.” He added that villagers had spent the rest of Saturday burying the dead and collecting spent bullet casings.

American officials said they acted while facing a perilous deadline and a tiny window of opportunity. Mr. Somers’s captors said in a video statement released Wednesday that they would kill him by Saturday unless unspecified demands were met. The ultimatum for Mr. Somers appeared to be largely a response to the first raid, on Nov. 25, an operation led by United States Special Operations commandos on a cave near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia. The commandos freed eight other hostages and killed seven militants, but found no sign of Mr. Somers, who apparently had been moved in the days before the operation.

By Saturday, though, the United States had tracked him to a walled compound in the village in southern Yemen. American intelligence, including spy satellites, surveillance drones and eavesdropping technology, had pinpointed the location of Mr. Somers and one other Western hostage inside the compound, according to a senior military official who provided an account of the operation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations.

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 Pierre KorkieCredit...Gift of Givers, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

America’s Special Operations forces have played a central role in global combat missions since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the most notable being the raid into Pakistan in 2011 that killed Osama bin Laden. But the challenges of distance, weather, equipment failure, pinpoint intelligence — and unpredictable actions by the adversary — are ever-present.

A raid in July by Special Operations forces against an Islamic State safe house in Syria also failed to free American hostages, who apparently had been relocated in advance of the mission.

In the case of the raid Saturday, the intelligence on Mr. Somers’s location was accurate. It seems likely that the deadline set by the militant captors to kill him on Saturday set the clock on carrying out the mission.

It remained to be seen whether the killings represented a larger shift in the tactics of Al Qaeda, which has largely turned away from executing hostages in recent years in favor of negotiating ransoms — a contrast to the frequent executions carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. When they have faced military raids, Al Qaeda militants have executed hostages.

The operation on Saturday began at about 1 a.m. The SEAL Team 6 commandos, joined by a small number of Yemeni counterterrorism troops, swept toward the village aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft under cover of darkness early Saturday local time. They landed several hundred yards from the compound in an effort to remain undetected.

Their effort faced steep odds. The compound, which was located in a remote, hilly area, surrounded by scrub, was guarded by about half a dozen gunmen, already jittery about a possible repeat of the previous rescue attempt. And the approach to the compound was sufficiently difficult that the commandos had virtually no element of surprise, which they typically plan for and rely on. The commandos were detected when they were less than 100 yards from the compound. It was not clear what alerted the militants.

“It was very difficult to catch them by enough surprise to prevent them from having time to execute the hostages,” said the senior military official, who monitored the operation overnight Friday into Saturday.

Heavily armed and wearing night-vision goggles, the commandos breached the compound and knew in which building the hostages were being held. But their advantage was already lost: The commandos saw one of the militants go into a small building long enough to shoot the hostages and leave. By the time the Americans reached the building, the militants had already fled. The commandos recovered Mr. Somers and Mr. Korkie, who were both gravely wounded. One of the hostages — officials did not say which one — died on the Osprey ride to the amphibious assault ship Makin Island, from which the rescue mission was launched off the Yemeni coast.

The other hostage died on the operating table after reaching the ship.

Mr. Korkie was kidnapped with his wife, Yolande Korkie, in May 2013. Ms. Korkie was released without a ransom in January after Gift of the Givers used its connections with tribal leaders in the area to contact the kidnappers, according to the charity’s director, Imtiaz Sooliman.

Negotiations for the release of Mr. Korkie proved more difficult, the aid group said, with Al Qaeda insisting on the payment of a ransom — even though the family said that they did not have the money. The South African government refused to intercede, Mr. Sooliman said in an interview in June.

In the statement posted on the Gift of the Givers website, the aid group said that “Pierre was to be released by Al Qaeda tomorrow.” Yemeni leaders were preparing “the final security and logistical arrangements,” the statement continued.

“It is even more tragic that the words we used in a conversation with Yolande at 5:59 this morning was, ‘The wait is almost over.’ ”

A correction was made on 
Dec. 6, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled part of the name of the ship from which the rescue mission was launched. It is the Makin Island, not the Malkin Island.

How we handle corrections

Kareem Fahim reported from Sana, Yemen, and Eric Schmitt from Manama, Bahrain. Rukmini Callimachi contributed reporting from Istanbul, Saeed Al-Batati from Al Mukalla, Yemen, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Hostages Killed in Yemen as U.S. Rescue Effort Fails. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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