Sudan says locates kidnappers and hostages

By Ashraf Badr and Andrew Heavens

CAIRO/KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudanese authorities have located a group of kidnappers and the 19 hostages they seized in Egypt last week but have no plans for a rescue attempt that could endanger them, a Sudanese official said on Tuesday.

Masked kidnappers snatched the hostages -- five Italians, five Germans, a Romanian and eight Egyptians -- from a desert safari near Egypt's southern border with Sudan and Libya on Friday and are thought to have whisked them out of Egypt.

The kidnappers have threatened to kill the hostages if authorities try to find them by plane, an Egyptian official with strong ties to security agencies said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But Egypt's tourism minister denied there was any such threat, the state news agency MENA reported.

Sudanese Foreign Ministry official Ali Youssef Ahmed said the hostages and their captors were about 25 km (15 miles) inside Sudanese territory near Jebel Oweinat, a mountain 1,900 meters (6,200 Feet) high near where Egypt, Sudan and Libya meet.

"An Egyptian team is conducting negotiations with this group on releasing the hostages, while Sudanese forces surround the site," Ahmed, who is head of protocol in the ministry, told the state news agency SUNA.

Ahmed said the information available indicated that the kidnappers were Egyptian. Egyptian officials have speculated that they are either Sudanese, Chadian or Egyptian.

"We are not going to have an operation that harms the hostages," added Mutrif Siddig, Sudanese undersecretary of foreign affairs. "We are intensifying our operation in the area. Our directive is to monitor and guarantee the safety of the hostages. Sudan is shouldering its responsibility."

The kidnapping of foreign tourists was the first of its kind in Egypt, and posed a new challenge to the security-conscious government in a country that depends on foreign tourism for 6 percent of the national economy.

Islamic militants hit the country's tourist industry in the 1990s and again in the mid-2000s with bomb and gun attacks that killed hundreds of people and weighed heavily on tourism.

Egypt's state-owned al-Ahram newspaper quoted Tourism Minister Zoheir Garrana on Tuesday as saying the hostages were all in good health, and that German authorities were in talks with the kidnappers over a ransom.

CONFLICTS

Security sources said the kidnappers were demanding 6 million euros ($8.8 million) to free the hostages, and said there was no sign militant Islamists were involved.

Attacks on tourists in the Nile Valley and the nearby deserts have been rare in recent years, though a series of bombings targeted tourists in the Sinai Peninsula between 2004 and 2006. The Egyptian government blamed the Sinai attacks on Bedouin with militant views.

Militant Islamists had earlier launched a series of attacks on tourists in the Nile Valley in the 1990s.

But Guido Steinberg, a political scientist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the kidnapping was a different phenomenon.