Footprints in sand helped lead to arrests in killings of French journalists

AP reports that the French troops who found the bodies of two slain French radio journalists in northern Mali followed footprints in the sand near the corpses to hunt their abductors, part of a search that eventually led to five arrests on Monday, a Mali military official said.
He added that the kidnappers’ vehicle had broken down, possibly prompting their decision to kill the captives.
The director of Radio France Internationale confirmed multiple arrests had been made. What remained unclear was who the kidnappers were, and whether they had ties to ethnic Tuareg separatists or al-Qaeda militants active in the region.
The slayings of Ghislaine Dupont, 51, a senior correspondent, and Claude Verlon, 58, a production technician, stunned France and were an unheard-of assault on Western journalists in Mali, where a French-led military operation this year aimed to clear out Islamic extremists who had taken over the vast north.