Last week I wrote about the escape from a Yemini prison of the terrorist convicted of carrying off the attack on the U.S.S. Cole HERE. In that post, it was noted that there was an international manhunt underway for the escapees, who had dug a 140 yard long escape tunnel from the prison to a mosque. Today, courtesy of Michelle Malkin, we have the "most wanted" pictures of the terrorists and notes:
Yemen is refusing a US interrogation request. More than 100 people are being detained in connection with the escape. Among the prisoners now on the lam: Jaber Elbaneh, 39, a U.S. citizen accused of training with the "Lackawanna Six."
The escapees included Jamal Badawi, the mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in October 2000, which killed 17 US sailors. He had received a death sentence, but the penalty was later commuted to 15 years in prison.
Another escapee was Fawaz al-Rabe'ie, sentenced to death as leader of the group convicted of bombing the French oil tanker Limburg off the Yemeni coast in 2002, killing one crewman.
A security source in Yemen said the tunnel from which the men escaped was thought to be about 460 feet long, twice as long as originally reported, and led to a mosque.
The source said authorities discovered the escape on Friday, but it was believed the prisoners had fled Thursday night and were aided by more than one accomplice on the outside because the tunnel was thought to have been dug from the mosque.
The tunnel entry was in the women's area of the mosque, less frequented than the male section because women mainly pray at home.
The 13 militants were among 23 inmates who broke out of jail in the capital, Sanaa, in a major embarrassment for Yemeni authorities, who have cracked down on militants in the ancestral land of Osama bin Laden and positioned themselves as an ally of the United States in the war on terrorism.
A Yemeni state-run website (
Interpol circulated a warning to its 184 member states yesterday over the missing prisoners and urged them to take extra precautions at their borders.
But two days after the escape was discovered, Interpol had not issued individual wanted notices for the fugitives because it said Yemeni authorities had not yet provided all the required information.
A government official in Sanaa said: ''The Interior Ministry sent an official letter to Interpol with the names of the fugitives, their photographs, and fingerprints. It asked them to circulate the list worldwide, fearing they might escape Yemen."
But an Interpol official said not all the conditions had been met for the issue of the so-called red notices.
An Interpol statement said, ''Red notices can only be issued by Interpol at the request of member countries and only if they are supported by underlying national arrest warrants."
Interpol's secretary general, Ronald Noble, asked Yemen to provide the required information immediately.
''Unless Interpol red notices are issued urgently for these fugitives and unless the world community commits itself to tracking them down, they will be able to travel internationally, to elude detection, and to engage in future terrorist activity," Noble said.
Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN: ''I feel very uneasy about this development. . . . We have so-called allies in the world that are saying they want to help us, and yet how do 23 people escape? It raises some terribly difficult questions.
''It really makes our job harder," she added. ''Now intelligence has to work on something they didn't think they had to work on."
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