Hostages

CAIRO -- The Algerian news agency reported Thursday that as many as 45 hostages, including Americans, had escaped from a natural gas complex a day after Islamic militants seized the installation in retaliation for French airstrikes against Islamist rebels in neighboring Mali.    The Algerian report said 30 Algerians and 15 foreigners had fled the compound Thursday. The report could not be independently confirmed. The Associated Press, quoting an unnamed Algerian official, said 20 foreigners, including Americans, had escaped.

A former prison guard accused of fatally shooting a 60-year-old man while holding him and his family hostage was charged Monday with murder, attempted murder and aggravated assault, prosecutors said. According to authorities, Alwyn Gibson II, 24, of Fairfield, Texas, was upset over a failed romantic relationship when he stormed the Irvine home of his ex-girlfriend's family.

Reporting from Seoul and Zamboanga City, Philippines -- Gunmen raided a remote Philippine village before dawn Thursday and abducted at least 75 people in a restive southern province, an army spokesman said. Within hours the assailants had freed 18 captives, 17 of them children, amid negotiations with government officials, authorities said. They freed nine others today and are demanding that murder charges be dropped The incident was the second recent mass abduction in the Philippines.

BOGOTA, Colombia — Ending a long-running and inhuman nightmare for the victims and their families, Colombia's largest rebel group on Monday released its final 10 military hostages, some of whom had been in captivity in makeshift jungle prisons for more than 14 years. A military helicopter on loan from the Brazilian government and staffed with international Red Cross mediators to complete a prearranged release plucked the four soldiers and six police hostages from the hands of rebels at an unspecified location on the border of Meta and Guaviare provinces in eastern Colombia.

Los Angeles police on Monday rescued a hostage who had been shot in the stomach and held in a Riverside County home in a suspected kidnapping-for-ransom, authorities said. The hostage was "taken by force" from his home in Van Nuys on Wednesday and taken to a two-story residence in an area of Riverside County near Corona, said Lt. Anne Clark of the Los Angeles Police Department's Robbery-Homicide Division.

I wonder whether Norman Podhoretz' wife and children are among the hostages who he is so eager to sacrifice! ILSE E. KORNFELD Los Angeles

Chechen rebels, who had fought their way into the neighboring Dagestan republic and killed nine border guards, released a group of hostages and left a village they had occupied, authorities said. Russian forces tracked down and killed at least six rebels, Interfax news agency reported.

Rival Palestinian factions swapped hostages under a cease-fire deal. The internal Palestinian violence in the Gaza Strip had been the fiercest since the Islamic militant group Hamas, which rejects peace talks with Israel, trounced the more moderate Fatah faction in elections last year, triggering a Western aid embargo.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- A little wild pig named Josefo, abandoned by his mother, helped keep Sgt. Jose Libardo Forero sane. For nearly 13 years, Forero was one of the "forgotten" hostages held by the leftist rebels known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. During that unending stretch of his life, spent chained to other prisoners round the clock or confined in barbed-wire pens, he found mental escape in bonding with jungle animals. The career police sergeant tells of the tiny bit of happiness he found befriending monkeys, parrots and, finally, Josefo, whom he initially kept alive by feeding him milk with a syringe (and who later got hooked on coffee)