Kidnappers have freed 19 hostages they seized in Egypt, including Western tourists, and all are safe and sound, Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said yesterday.
The tourists, identified as five Italians, five Germans, a Romanian and eight Egyptians, had been on safari in a remote desert border area, Egyptian officials said.
"They have been released, all of them, safe and sound," Aboul Gheit told reporters in New York before a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. "It was a group of gangsters."
The kidnapping was the first of its kind in Egypt in living memory, although Islamic militants have hit the country's tourist industry in recent decades with bomb and gun attacks that have killed hundreds. Tourism Minister Zoheir Garrana said the hostages had been taken out of the country.
The tourists were believed to have been seized on Friday from a safari near where the borders of Egypt, Sudan and Libya meet.
Security sources said the kidnappers had asked for €6 million to free the hostages, They said there was no sign militant Islamists were involved.
The state-run Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported that the group had spent the night of September 16 in a hotel in Dakhla oasis in Egypt's Western Desert before heading out towards the Gilf al-Kebir national reserve. They had been due to reach another oasis on Saturday to end their tour, but never made it.
Mr Garrana said authorities learned of the kidnapping after a tour operator called his German wife and told her he was being held hostage with the group. Egyptian state TV said those held included an Egyptian border guard officer.
Gilf al-Kebir, the area where the tourists were seized, attracts adventure travellers with bleak desert scenes including a massive crater and the Cave of Swimmers, whose prehistoric paintings were made famous by the 1996 film 'The English Patient'.
Mr Garrana told Egyptian television the kidnappers were "most likely" Sudanese. He later told Al Jazeera TV that the area from which the kidnapped tour operator called his wife indicated that the hostages had been taken to Sudan.
Attacks on tourists in Egypt's Nile Valley and the deserts around it have been rare in recent years, although a series of bombings targeted tourists in resorts in the Sinai Peninsula between 2004 and 2006. Egypt blamed the Sinai attacks on Bedouin with militant views.
Those attacks weighed on Egypt's tourism industry, although it has since recovered with nearly 10 million tourists visiting Egypt in the 2006-2007 fiscal year.