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American Oil Worker Is Kidnapped in Yemen

Shuaib AlmosawaNour Youssef and

SANA, Yemen — An American oil worker was abducted from his car by unidentified gunmen on a busy street in the Yemeni capital, his wife and colleagues said on Monday.

The American, Danny Lavone Burch, 63, had spent years in Yemen working as an engineer at a Yemeni oil company when he was abducted on Saturday morning.

“They did it in broad daylight in front of everyone,” Nadia Forsa, Mr. Burch’s wife, said by phone from Sana, the capital.

Many Westerners have been abducted over the years in Yemen, a poor country on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula that has long been roiled by civil conflicts.

Armed groups, including a powerful affiliate of Al Qaeda and the Houthi rebels who control Sana, have abducted foreigners to extract ransoms from their governments or because they accuse them of being spies.

In recent years, Yemen has been locked in a war between the Houthis in the north and forces nominally loyal to the internationally recognized president in the south.

Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Arab countries that back the president have been bombing Houthi-controlled areas to try to restore the president to the capital, contributing to a large humanitarian crisis.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for Mr. Burch’s abduction, and it remained unclear why he was taken.

Mr. Burch worked on oil rigs in Yemen starting in 1994 and traveled back and forth between there and the United States before moving to Yemen in 2005, a son from his first marriage, Stephen Burch, said in a telephone interview on Monday from Louisiana, where his father was born and where he lives. Mr. Burch had divorced his American-born wife in 2000, the son said, and has had virtually no contact with him or his other two children, a second son and a daughter.

Mr. Burch’s LinkedIn page said he graduated from Kilgore College, in Texas, and had most recently worked as a mechanic and cement technician at Safer, a state-owned oil company. He had converted to Islam, married Ms. Forsa, who is from Yemen, and had three children, ages 7, 9 and 12, according to his wife and colleagues.

Ms. Forsa said her husband had left home on Saturday morning to take their sons to a sports club. When he did not return, she called him and found that his phone had been turned off. She called the club, and then his office, but no one knew where he was.

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Danny Lavone BurchCredit...Nadia Forsa

“I knew that something was wrong,” she said.

The police later told her that witnesses said he had been stopped on a busy street in Sana by five armed men in civilian clothes who drove a pickup truck with no license plates.

After they took Mr. Burch away, two of them parked his car on a side street, where Ms. Forsa later found it, she said.

“When I saw the car, my heart fell,” she said.

She told the couple’s sons that their father was traveling and that she looked upset because he had not told her ahead of time. “I don’t want to ruin their lives,” she said.

The abduction took place in a part of Yemen that is tightly controlled by the Houthis and where Al Qaeda is not believed to have an active presence.

Ms. Forsa said she did not know who had taken her husband. “We don’t know who is behind this,” she said.

A Yemeni security official and two of Mr. Burch’s colleagues at the oil company confirmed the account, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists.

A spokesman for the United States Embassy to Yemen, currently based in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, said it could neither confirm nor deny the kidnapping.

The United States’ State Department has warned American citizens against traveling to Yemen because of “the high security threat level posed by ongoing conflict and terrorist activities.”

In recent years, rebel groups in Sana have “systematically detained U.S. citizens,” many of whom are not allowed to communicate with their families or consular officials, the department says on its website.

It also says the United States government has limited ability to help those in detention because embassy operations were suspended and its American employees removed from the country in February 2015.

In 2015, a Frenchwoman working on a project with the World Bank was abducted with her Yemeni interpreter near Sana. Both women were released later that year.

In 2014, American commandos raided a village in southern Yemen to try to free an American held by Al Qaeda’s regional brach, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But the hostages — Luke Somers, an American photojournalist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher who was being held with him — were killed by their captors when they realized that a rescue attempt was underway, United States officials said.

Reporting was contributed by Shuaib Almosawa reported from Sana, Nour Youssef from Cairo, Ben Hubbard from Istanbul and Daniel Victor from New York. Doris Burke contributed research.

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