Islamic militants holding an American engineer hostage in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday threatened to execute him within 72 hours unless the kingdom released the group’s fighters from jail. In film posted on an Islamist Web site, the blindfolded hostage, Paul Marshall Johnson Jr., haltingly repeats his full name and says that he is an American and that he works on Apache helicopters. Shown from the side in the greenish light of a night vision camera, Mr. Johnson, 49, has a dragonlike tattoo visible on his left biceps where his shirt has been torn away. The posting includes both a written threat from the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – which is believed to be inspired by Osama bin Laden’s terror network, rather than an official arm of it – and a videotaped recording echoing the same Friday deadline by Abdelaziz al-Muqrin, the self-proclaimed leader of the group.Full Story
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