Missing Sahara tourists apparently alive: diplomat

Agence France-Presse | April 27, 2003

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The 31 European tourists missing in the Algerian Sahara desert are apparently alive and in captivity, and Algerian authorities are working to obtain their release, a Mali diplomat said.

Algeria has deployed thousands of soldiers in a major hunt for 15 Germans, 10 Austrians, four Swiss, a Dutchman and a Swede missing in the vast desert, which in Algeria alone covers two million square kilometres (775,000 square miles).

"The 31 have been spotted and our Algerian brothers are working in double quick time to ensure their release," the official told AFP in Bamako, capital of the neighbouring state of Mali to the south.

Police said Sunday in Algiers investigators had found their first material evidence of the tourists in the form of a truck that belonged to a German couple.

The Mali diplomat, who returned Sunday from Algiers as member of a visiting delegation, said he had heard talk there of a ransom demanded for the tourists, some of whom have been missing since February.

"From what I heard, the Algerians are on the right track and working discreetly but effectively."

There has been speculation that the missing tourists, who had travelled in several small groups, might have been kidnapped for ransom.

In Algiers, police said an Iveco truck was found some 150 kilometres (90 miles) west of Illizi, a Saharan town 1,500 kilometres southeast of Algiers.

The two Germans driving it went missing on March 8.

Like the others they were travelling in small groups without local guides.

Smugglers, drug runners and a militant group linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network are said to haunt the area.

The Mali diplomat declined to give details of whose hands the tourists had apparently fallen into.

But in an interview with an Algerian newspaper Sunday, the official in charge of the search operation dismissed the possibility of kidnappings by armed Islamic extremists.

"For the time being, we have received no sign to back up that hypothesis," Colonel Messaoud Benboudria told El Watan newspaper:

"If we suppose that they have been kidnapped, why don't those responsible speak out?" he asked. Algeria's armed Islamic extremist groups "do not keep hostages," he said. "They tend to kill them, either for media effect or as a bargaining tool."

"Supposing it were true, it would take twice as many kidnappers, or about 60 people, to keep the group hostage. To keep 90 people alive in the desert takes colossal means and a considerable amount of water."

Benboudria said he believed the travellers had become lost in violent sandstorms that swept the area in late February.

Algerian authorities have launched a major hunt, deploying more than 7,000 people, including 5,000 soldiers, to comb the area.