Missing French Journalist Found Strangled in Yemen

December 2, 2011
A French-Algerian journalist who was found strangled by an electrical cord in a hotel room in the Yemeni Capital of Sanaa had been missing for four days before his body was discovered on Monday. The journalist hasn't yet been named, nor has the media company for which he worked. France 24 denied an early report that he worked there, after Reuters reported that police had found a France 24 identification card on him. The man was found in the hotel Al-Maali, which is "near the presidential palace in an area controlled by Yemen's Republican Guard, an elite force commanded by the son of President Ali Abdullah Saleh," the Associated Press reports. "The guards have been battling renegade troops and armed tribesmen in Sanaa for months as Saleh tries to cling to power in the face of a popular uprising demanding he step down and stand trial.
" On Twitter, a fellow Yemen-based French journalist, Benjamin Wiacek, has already started suggesting a conspiracy theory, positing that the man was not a journalist at all, but some kind of government agent carrying a fake identification card. With so little information released, however, the case remains a mystery to almost everybody.