A tense police operation lasting three hours ended on Thursday when officers stormed a bank and found a clerk bound inside. But there was no sign of the thieves.
Libya said on Sunday it was to release two German members of a group that aids illegal migrants who were detained by coastguards after their boat entered its territorial waters.
Two Germans kidnapped by Islamic militants in the Philippines are safely back at their Manila embassy, officials said on Saturday after a harrowing six-month ordeal in which they endured threats of beheading and seemingly routine cruelty.
<b>UPDATE:</b> A man threatened to set fire to a fast-food outlet in southern Germany on Thursday night with 12 people inside. The 14-hour stand-off ended on Friday morning when armed police stormed the restaurant.
Police in Cologne ended a 10-hour hostage situation on Friday by shooting the suspect in the shoulder. The man entered a kindergarten and trapped the director.
Yemeni hostage-takers holding a family of five Germans and a Briton since June are demanding a ransom of $2 million for their release, news magazine <i>Der Spiegel</i> reported on Wednesday.
A 77-year-old German tourist has been released by terrorists in Mali after spending almost three months as their captive, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Wednesday evening.
A German woman and her parents, freed by kidnappers in Yemen on Friday after a five-day ordeal, are still in the country, a source close to the German embassy said, contradicting an earlier report they had already left for home.
Yemeni security forces laid siege on Tuesday to a remote mountain town where tribesmen were holding hostage a German couple and their daughter, a security official said.
The rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which last week kidnapped three Germans in Turkey, said Sunday it was "strong enough" to hit German economic targets, an agency close to the group reported.
Kurdish rebels confirmed they had kidnapped three Germans on a climbing trip in eastern Turkey, the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency reported Thursday. They called on Germany to end its "hostile policies" against the Kurdish people.
According to a newspaper report, the alleged secret training of Libyan security forces by German police could have been in return for Tripoli's help in a Philippine hostage crisis.
