| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2008 
Kidnapped South Koreans Released in Mexic
 Robin Emmott - Reuters
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| | Lee Jeong-Gwan (right), South Korea's director general for consular affairs, gestures before a briefing at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul July 23. Five South Koreans held hostage in Mexico for eight days have been released unharmed, the foreign ministry said Wednesday. (AFP/Jung Yeon-Je) | | |
Reynosa, Mexico - Mexican police freed five South Koreans on Tuesday in a violent city on the U.S. border after they had been kidnapped by people smugglers, a state attorney general's office said.
The four men and a woman were taken captive on Monday in Reynosa near Texas, and the kidnappers had demanded $30,000 in ransom.
A South Korean foreign ministry official said they would soon be handed over to South Korean authorities.
"Police found the five Koreans held in a hotel in Reynosa. It seems the people smugglers offered to take them across to the United States but then kidnapped them for a much bigger ransom," said a spokesman for the Tamaulipas state attorney general's office.
He said the rescue came after intelligence work and tip-offs in northern Mexico and Mexico City.
The five South Koreans worked in the used car trade and were in Mexico on business, local media reported, citing diplomatic sources.
(Reporting by Magdiel Hernandez in Reynosa, Miguel Angel Gutierrez in Mexico City and Jon Herskovitz and Kim Junghyun in Seoul, editing by Jackie Frank) |
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