The kidnappers who seized 19 hostages including European tourists in a remote desert area of Egypt have threatened to kill them if attempts are made to find them by plane, an Egyptian official said yesterday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the kidnapped tour operator contacted his German wife and told her of the threat, which she reported to Egyptian authorities.
The masked kidnappers took the 19 people — five Italians, five Germans, a Romanian and eight Egyptians — while they were on an adventure safari in southwestern Egypt on Friday.
It was the first time foreign tourists had been kidnapped in Egypt.
The official said Egyptian authorities had traced to Sudan calls from the kidnappers to the tour operator’s German wife.
The Egyptian state-owned daily newspaper al-Ahram yesterday quoted Tourism Minister Zoheir Garrana as saying the hostages were all in good health, and that German authorities were in talks with the kidnappers over the ransom.
Garana said the kidnappers were demanding a ransom of between US$8 million and US$15 million, Egypt’s official MENA news agency reported late on Monday that.
A security source said Egyptian authorities were also in talks with the kidnappers.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said at the UN on Monday that the tourists had been freed and were safe and sound, but officials later denied that account.
Garrana told Egyptian television on Monday that the kidnappers were “most likely” Sudanese.
He said the group was being held in the Karkuk Talh, just across the border in Sudan, having started their safari near Gilf el-Kabir.
The tourism ministry stressed that “this is an act of banditry not of terrorism.”
“Four masked gunmen attacked four vehicles affiliated to a tourist company. They kidnapped the tourists and led them to the Sudanese lands,” MENA quoted the ministry as saying.
Authorities only became aware of the kidnapping when the tour company owner, who is among the missing, used a satellite telephone to call his German wife and tell her of the ransom demand.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS