Al-Qaeda in Yemen threatens American hostage Luke Somers

Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen has threatened an American hostage kidnapped over a year ago, giving Washington three days to meet unspecified demands and denouncing US actions in the Arabian Peninsula country in a new video released yesterday.

The hostage, identified as 33-year-old Luke Somers, an American photojournalist born in Britain, is featured for the first time in the video, which was posted on the al-Qaeda offshoot's Twitter account. It was first reported by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant sites.

The footage apparently seeks to mimic hostage videos released by al-Qaeda's rivals from Islamic State, which has threatened - and later beheaded - several American and British hostages in the aftermath of a summer blitz that captured much of Iraq and Syria.

Somers was kidnapped in September last year from a street in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, where he had worked as a freelancer for the Yemen Times.

Somers was likely among a group of hostages who were the objective of a rescue mission by US special forces and Yemeni troops last month that freed eight captives in a remote corner of Yemen's Hadramawt province.

At the time, a Yemeni official said the mission, carried out in a vast desert area dotted with dunes called Hagr al-Saiaar, an al-Qaeda safe haven not far from the Saudi border, failed to liberate five other hostages. Among them were an American journalist and a Briton who were moved elsewhere by their al-Qaeda captors days before the raid.