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The heads of seven men who were kidnapped by the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group on southern Jolo island have been delivered in sacks to the Philippine army, officials say. The men - six road workers and a factory worker – were seized at gunpoint in two separate incidents on Monday near the town of Parang.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraqi insurgents are no longer using just volunteers as suicide car bombers but are instead kidnapping drivers, rigging their vehicles with explosives and blowing them up, the Defense Ministry said Thursday. In what appears to be a new tactic for the insurgency, the ministry said the kidnap victims do not know their cars have been loaded with explosives when they are released. The ministry issued a statement saying that first "a motorist is kidnapped with his car. They then booby trap the car without the driver knowing. Then the kidnapped driver is released and threatened to take...

LONDON (Reuters) - Do you have memories of being abducted by aliens and whisked away in a spaceship?You wouldn't be alone. Several thousand people worldwide claim to have had such close encounters, researchers say. But in a new study, a psychology expert at London's Goldsmiths College says these experiences are proof of the frailty of the human memory, rather than evidence of life in other galaxies. "Maybe what we're dealing with here is false memories, and not that people are actually being abducted and taken aboard spaceships," says Professor Chris French, who surveyed 19 self-proclaimed alien abductees. Several of the...

Hasuike tells kids about abductions (Asahi Shimbun) KASHIWAZAKI, Niigata Prefecture-With the emotional reunion over, the North Korean-born children of repatriated abductees Kaoru and Yukiko Hasuike got a heavy dose of reality Monday. Their father told them that he and their mother were abducted to North Korea, where the couple lived until they returned to Japan in 2002. Speaking at a news conference here, Kaoru Hasuike, 46, said he told his two children earlier in the day about having been abducted. Hasuike said his children seemed shocked by the news, but that his 19-year-old son, Katsuya, had suspected as much. He...

N.Korea to Let Japan Abductee Relatives Leave By George Nishiyama PYONGYANG (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has agreed to let all eight relatives of Japanese abducted by Pyongyang decades ago leave for Japan, media said, and a Japanese official said five would be reunited with their parents in Tokyo Saturday. The agreement on the emotional issue of the divided families came after a 90-minute summit between Kim and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that was also expected to touch on North Korea (news - web sites)'s nuclear arms program. "You can take them today or later," Kyodo news...

<p>May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met with North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il in an attempt to secure the freedom of family members of abducted Japanese citizens and seek progress on efforts to halt the communist nation's nuclear weapons program during his one-day visit in Pyongyang.</p>

TOKYO: North Korea on Thursday threatened to call off talks with Japan on security issues unless Tokyo returns to Pyongyang five Japanese who are visiting their homes decades after they were abducted to the communist state. "Japan is creating a new obstacle to an improvement in relations between Japan and DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- North Korea) in violation of an inter-government agreement," a North Korean foreign minstry spokesman said. The statement was carried by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) monitored here. The five abductees, including two married couples and the wife of a US defector,...

One of two young American women involved in a celebrated Saudi-American abduction case praised Osama bin Laden during an off-camera interview with Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor" this week, before she and her sister announced they wanted to stay in Saudi Arabia where their father took them against their will in 1986. "The sisters repeatedly said they don't want to see their mother and they don't want to come to the United States," reported Stacey Hocheiser, a producer for the "O'Reilly Factor," after arranging an interview in London with the daughters of Pat Roush, Aliyah and Aisha Geshyan. When...