SANAA: Seven out of nine foreign hostages including a child were found murdered in northern Yemen on Monday, a security official said.

“We have found the corpses of seven people who were kidnapped,” the official said. “They were killed.” Two of the three children captured with the group were reportedly found alive.

The bodies were found by the son of a tribal leader

in Noshour, east of the volatile Saada mountainous area of northern Yemen where the nine were abducted, the official said.

The authorities had accused Shiite Zaidi rebels in Saada of seizing seven

Germans, a British engineer and a South Korean woman teacher. The rebels denied

the charge.

The nine — among them three German children and two women nurses — belong to an international relief group that has worked

at a hospital in Saada province bordering Saudi Arabia for 35 years, an official said on Sunday.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the kidnapping — the latest in a string of abductions of foreigners in one of the poorest countries in the world.

In Berlin Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could not confirm the report of deaths of hostages.

“We know of this information. We are pressing ahead for examination of this information. For the moment, I cannot give any confirmation,” she said.

South Korea’s foreign

ministry also said it had no

information and was checking the report.

Seoul had confirmed that a 34-year-old South Korean identified only by her family name Eom had been missing in yemen since Thursday evening when she joined other members of the relief group for a walk.

Local sources said the group was a Christian Baptist organisation that also has a medical team in the hospital at Jebla, south of Sanaa, where an Islamist militant killed three American doctors in December 2002.

A Yemeni official on Sunday said the group was taken hostage by members of the Huthi Zaidi rebel group which has been fighting the government since 2004.

But a rebel spokesman dismissed the accusation as “baseless,” and said the kidnapping took place in an area controlled by security forces in the town of Saada in the centre of rugged mountain range. Gunmen took hostage 28 foreign medical staff members — including Arabs — from a hospital in Amran, north of Sanaa on Thursday and released them on Friday following tribal mediation, media reports said.

Huthi rebels were also blamed for that kidnapping.

Foreigners are often kidnapped in Yemen by tribesmen to use as bargaining chips with the government over local disputes. More than 200 foreigners have been abducted over the past 15 years.