Thai Police Rescue Kidnaped Japanese

Thai police stormed a jungle hide-out along the Mekong River, 325 miles northeast of Bangkok, and rescued a kidnaped Japanese businessman after a gun battle that left two Laotian kidnapers dead, authorities said Thursday.

The hostage, Yoshiaki Asao, 61, head of the Japanese trading company Mitsui and Co. in Laos, was abducted from his house in the Laotian capital of Vientiane before dawn March 1 and taken across the border to the hide-out. No ransom demands were made and no claims of responsibility were issued for the kidnaping, the second abduction of a Mitsui executive in Southeast Asia in the past three years.