The Islamic State (IS) militants on Sunday released 19 Christian Assyrians they had kidnapped last month, a monitoring group reported.
The 19 people are the first batch of 29 Assyrians the sharia court of the IS exonerated on Saturday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, Xinhua reported.
On February 23, the IS abducted 220 Christian Assyrians during an assault it had waged on predominantly Assyrian areas, mainly in the area of Tal Tamr and its countryside in Syria's northeastern province of al-Hasakah.
The fate of the other abductees is still unknown amid reports that the rest of the Assyrians are awaiting trials in the IS courts.
There is no clear reason why would the IS even put the Assyrians on trial.
Also on Sunday, the pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV said the Syrian troops captured as many as 33 towns in the eastern countryside of Hasaka after clashes with the IS.
The Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 which went missing March 8 with 239 people on-board shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, it is officially announced in Kuala Lumpur Monday, ended in the southern Indian Ocean with no survivors.
The Malaysia Airlines plane with 239 people on board that went missing March 8 "is lost" and there are no hopes of survivors, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced Monday.
Japanese search and rescue teams joined Chinese aircraft Sunday in the hunt for signs of missing Malaysian plane -- MH370 -- which has mysteriously vanished.
Search for a missing Malaysian airliner yielded no result even more than a fortnight after it disappeared but Australian acting Prime Minister Warren Truss Sunday said the hunt will continue as long as there is hope. Search continued in the southern Indian Ocean after sightings of debris believed to be from the plane
The search for the missing Malaysian airliner ended Saturday in the southern Indian Ocean with the sighting of some objects with the naked eye even as China said that one of its satellites has spotted an object in the search area.
It looks like a replay of the Devyani Khobragade affair that strained India-US relations, but it isn't. A former domestic worker has slapped a civil suit against Bangladesh's consul general in New York and his wife accusing them of keeping him in slave-like conditions.
