Fourteen European hostages released by their captors have told a German minister they are ”doing well”, after an ordeal of more than five months in the Sahara desert, German and Dutch media reported on Tuesday.
Germany’s ZDF public television station said some of the freed hostages — nine Germans, four Swiss and one Dutchman — had talked to German deputy foreign minister Juergen Chrobog by satellite telephone overnight.
”There are no serious illnesses. Their health is better than we thought. It is surprising considering the living conditions the hostages have endured these last few months,” said Chrobog.
The mother of Dutch hostage Arjen Hilbers told Dutch public radio this morning her son had called her by satellite phone after he was freed on Monday.
”He sounded calm and poised and said he was coming home,” Anneke Hilbers told Radio 1.
”We were really surprised he called, it was great and we are very happy,” she said.
The Malian president’s office announced late on Monday that the hostages, captured in February and March in Algeria and later taken to Mali, had been freed by their captors, thought to be Algerian Islamic extremists.
ZDF said the group was traveling on Tuesday to Gao, eastern Mali, where they are to board a Transall C160 transport plane for a two-hour flight to the capital Bamako.
They are to be examine by doctors to determine if they are in condition to make the six-hour flight to the western German city of Cologne, where they will be reunited with their families either on Tuesday night or early on Wednesday.
Between February and May, 32 European adventure tourists were captured in the Algerian Sahara in small groups by abductors believed to belong to an Islamic extremist faction called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which has alleged ties to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
Seventeen of the original hostages were freed in May by Algerian special forces.
One German hostage, 46-year-old mother of two Michaela Spitzer, died in Algeria at the end of June, reportedly of heatstroke. – Sapa-AFP