3 Americans Reportedly Held by Kurdish Rebels in Turkey

Kurdish guerrillas have kidnaped three Americans traveling in eastern Turkey, U.S. officials said Saturday--an apparently new tactic to draw attention to their fight for an independent Kurdistan.

The three Americans were among five foreigners abducted Friday evening at a guerrilla checkpoint on a remote mountain highway near the eastern town of Bingol, U.S. Embassy spokesman Larry Taylor said.

The Americans were identified as Ronald Eldon Wyatt, Marvin T. Wilson and Richard M. Rives.

The men were in eastern Turkey on an expedition to what they believed to be the site of the biblical Noah’s ark, an official with Noah’s Ark Found L.P., of Nashville, which was sponsoring the mission, told the Associated Press.

The Americans were traveling with an Austrian, identified as Allen S. Roberts, in a private car, while a Briton, Gareth Johns Thomas, was picked out among travelers on a commercial bus, a Turkish official said.

“We are mounting a big operation by land and air to find them,” the official said. “It’s too early to draw conclusions, but (the kidnapers) were checking passports. They were looking for foreigners.”

Doug Snider, a general partner in Noah’s Ark Found, said Wyatt was trying to arrange for permits to do a preliminary excavation and was working on a television special about the mission, the AP reported.

About 24 hours after the kidnaping, no claim of responsibility had been made. But Turkish and Kurdish sources said the abduction bore the stamp of the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, which staged its first abduction of foreigners by seizing 10 German tourists in early August. The Germans were freed unharmed after a week.

“The PKK has become very strong in the southeast,” said a Kurdish journalist in the regional center of Diyarbakir. “They know if they kidnap Turks, nobody pays attention. They are seeking to publicize their fight.”

The PKK, made up mainly of Turkish Kurds, launched an armed struggle for an independent Kurdistan in 1984. Since then, more than 3,000 people have been killed in the conflict.