A group of tourists and their guides held hostage in the Sahara for 10 days returned home on Tuesday with tales of their ordeal and how all 19 of them packed into a single car and fled their captors.
”We put our trust in God and drove for five or six hours through the desert with no spare tyre and very little water,” said Mirella De Giuli, a 70-year-old Italian who was captured along with 10 other European holidaymakers and eight Egyptian guides during a safari holiday in Egypt on September 19. ”If we’d made a mistake we’d have died.”
De Giuli said the entire party had packed into a single Land Rover as they set off into a barren wilderness.
”They made all 19 of us get aboard,” she told reporters on her arrival at Turin airport.
Another of the hostages who returned to Italy on Tuesday, Giovanna Quaglia, recounted how, moments earlier, the kidnappers had ”stuck a GPS into my hand and said: ‘Right. You go’.”
Confusion surrounded the motives of the captors and the way the hostages were freed. Earlier accounts from Egyptian and Sudanese sources referred to a clash between the hostage-takers and security forces in which some of the kidnappers had died.
Italy’s Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, said on Tuesday there was neither a raid nor any ransom payment. The hostage-takers were ”robbers, not ideologically motivated captors, and at a certain point they felt themselves to be surrounded and beleaguered”.
De Giuli’s partner, Walter Barotto (68) described how the party was seized. ”They made us kneel on the ground at gunpoint and then took us away,” he said.
Quaglia added that the hostages were treated well by the 40 or so kidnappers. ”But it was really tough,” she said. ”Our real strength were our Egyptian guides, who always protected us.”
After their nerve-racking drive through the desert, the five Italians, five Germans, one Romanian and the Egyptians came across two armed men. ”We were afraid they too were robbers,” said Barotto. ”But luckily they were Egyptian soldiers, and we realised it really was over.” – guardian.co.uk