Spanish hostage freed in Mali arrives home

Alicia Gamez gestures during her arrival at Barcelona's airport March 10, 2010.

MADRID (Reuters) - One of three Spanish aid workers kidnapped by a group believed to be al Qaeda's wing in North Africa arrived back in Spain Wednesday after she was released in Mali.

Looking tired and thinner than in photos taken before she was seized along with two other Spaniards in northern Mauritania by a gang armed with machine guns in November, Alicia Gamez flew into Barcelona airport on a Spanish government plane.

"I'm really happy to be back home and my happiness will be complete when Albert and Roque are back too," she said in a brief prepared statement to journalists.

Albert Vilalta and Roque Pascual, Gamez's companions on the aid convoy heading for Senegal, are still being held by the group which Spain said was probably al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

"We will continue working hard to ensure that Albert and Roque can come home as soon as possible," Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega told a press conference. She said no ransom had been paid for Gamez.

The government was unable to confirm reports that an Italian woman was freed at the same time as Gamez, although a source close to the presidency in neighboring Burkina Faso understood she had not yet been released.

Gamez, freed two weeks after the release of a Frenchman taken by the same group, said her companions had been relatively well-treated and were in good health but that conditions had been hard in the desert.

The militants obtained the release of four Islamist prisoners in Mali before they returned Frenchman Pierre Camatte.

Gamez and her co-workers were snatched on the road between the capital of Mauritania, Nouakchott, and the coastal trading city of Nouadhibou.

The hostages were believed to have been moved to Mali's remote north, where a mix of smugglers, bandits and groups linked to AQIM are known to operate.

The group emerged in 2007 from the Salafist GSPC movement which battled Algerian security forces during the 1990s. It has waged a campaign of suicide bombings and ambushes in Algeria but in the past few years has shifted part of its activities south to the Sahara desert.

Last year it killed a British hostage and analysts say it hopes to secure multi-million dollar ransoms to help achieve its goals.

Anti-insurgency officials from Europe and the United States fear that al Qaeda could turn the Sahara region, with its sparely-populated expanses and porous borders, into a safe haven for their activities along the lines of Somalia or Yemen.

(Additional reporting by Raquel Castillo in Madrid and Mathieu Bonkoungou in Ouagadougou; editing by Noah Barkin)