The World - News from March 12, 1987

Mozambican troops have wrested a strategic town from rebels who captured it more than 1 1/2 years ago, a Portuguese news agency said. The Lusa news agency quoted Mozambican officials as saying that Luabo, the center of the country’s sugar industry, fell to government forces Monday. Rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance, battling the Marxist government, seized hostages, including a Briton, an Irishman and several Portuguese, after capturing the town in July, 1985, and destroying a British-owned sugar refinery. The last of the hostages were freed last December.