After failed Yemen raid, US says it was unaware of S. African talks

The United States did not know about talks on the reportedly imminent release of a South African hostage who died in a US raid on al-Qaeda militants in Yemen, the US ambassador in South Africa said Monday.

Ambassador Patrick Gaspard said American officials were “unaware of ongoing negotiations that had any resolution” between the militants and Gift of the Givers, a South African humanitarian relief group that had been acting on behalf of the family of South African hostage Pierre Korkie. Gaspard also said it was “not altogether clear” to him that the South African government was even aware of the talks.

Korkie and American hostage Luke Somers were killed Saturday during a US-led rescue attempt. Imtiaz Sooliman, founder of Gift of the Givers, has said that Korkie was supposed to be released Sunday under a deal struck with al-Qaeda.

Gaspard said the US hadn’t been informed about that. The US decided to carry out the raid because the militants had threatened to kill Somers, Gaspard said.

“We were just completely unaware of those developments and had to act hastily,” the ambassador said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He also said the United States had believed before the raid that there may have been “other hostages in the vicinity” of Somers’s location, but did not have details on the nationalities of any captives.

“At no time was it apparent that Pierre Korkie was being held in the same space as the American photojournalist Luke Somers,” the US Embassy in Pretoria said in a statement.

US President Barack Obama has said he ordered the raid because Somers was believed to be in “imminent danger” after al-Qaeda released a video showing Somers and threatening to kill him in three days if the US did not meet the group’s unspecified demands.

Gaspard cited comments by Sooliman, the aid group director, that there were no guarantees that the negotiated release of Korkie would have proceeded smoothly. However, the ambassador said the talks appeared to have made progress.

“It does appear that they were pretty far down the track,” Gaspard said.

Meanwhile, Somers’ British relatives criticized the raid Monday, saying they would have preferred negotiations.

“I think the family would have like to have seen more attempts to solve the problem before it came to a crisis,” the British-born photojournalist’s stepmother Penny Bearman told BBC radio.

Bearman also told The Times newspaper: “We are sure that Luke would have given support to the ongoing discussions (to secure his release) in Yemen rather than the conflict approach. There had been threats before that had not been carried out.”

Somers’ father Michael was “quite angry… because if there had not been a rescue attempt he would still be alive,” she was quoted as saying.

But she added in her BBC interview: “We don’t blame the American government for attempting to rescue him.”

“If they’d been able to pull him out we would have been singing their praises,” she said.

Somers was kidnapped in September 2013 and so it was “quite surprising” that US President Barack Obama sanctioned the attempted rescue 15 months on.

She said his relatives were not given “any warning at all” about the raid.

“We had no idea, it was a complete shock,” she said.

Half-sister Lucy Somers, 25, said the photojournalist hoped his pictures would help resolve the political and military chaos in the Arabian Peninsula state.

“The tragedy of his death, and injustice of how he was used, must be undone by the warmth, strength and humanity of his images,” she told The Times.