In brief: Former Palestinian prisoners arrested

JERUSALEM – The Israeli army has re-arrested 51 former Palestinian prisoners as part of a furious search for three missing Israeli teens believed to have been abducted in the West Bank.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said today that the 51 were among more than 65 Palestinians detained overnight in the search for the teens.

The 51 were part of a group of 1,027 Palestinians released in 2011 from Israeli prisons in exchange for an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants in a cross-border raid in 2006.

Israel believes Hamas was behind the abduction of the teens, who disappeared last week on the way home from a religious seminary.

Lerner says that since the disappearance, a total of 240 Palestinians have been arrested in the West Bank.

Boat carrying migrants sinks

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – A wooden boat carrying 97 Indonesian migrants capsized and sank after leaving Malaysia’s west coast as rescuers scrambled to try to save 66 people still missing, Malaysia’s maritime agency said today.

The boat was believed to have sunk shortly after midnight while trying to leave Malaysia illegally, said the agency’s official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

He said that the Indonesians, including women and children, were believed to be heading home ahead of the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

The Malaysian official said that 31 people have been rescued so far. A ship and several boats were searching for survivors and a helicopter was to be dispatched, he said.

Russian journalists killed by mortar fire

MOSCOW – Two Russian journalists for a Russian state-owned TV channel died Tuesday in eastern Ukraine after being hit by mortar fire, the Rossiya 24 network said.

Correspondent Igor Kornelyuk, 37, died during surgery in a hospital after being wounded while on assignment in Luhansk. The whereabouts of the sound engineer who was with him were unknown throughout the day, but in late evening the network announced that Anton Voloshin had been confirmed dead as well.

Viktor Denisov, a cameraman working with Kornelyuk, said in a television broadcast that they were filming Ukrainian refugees fleeing the area north of the regional capital when mortar fire began. Denisov was not next to Kornelyuk when he was wounded.