International television presenter Anita McNaught and her Kiwi cameraman husband Olaf Wiig are understood to have separated.
Wiig made headlines around the world last year when he and a fellow journalist were held hostage by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, with his high-profile wife leading appeals for
his safe return.
Night after night, McNaught appeared on television appealing for her husband's captors to release the pair while by day searching the troubled Middle Eastern area with Fox journalists.
After 13 days in captivity, Wiig and Steve Centanni were released, having appeared in a video-tape saying - at gunpoint - that they had "embraced Islam with the Prophet Mohammed as their leader".
But the fact that they have high-powered media jobs in different countries has fuelled speculation that McNaught and Wiig have split, less than a year after their dramatic reunion.
McNaught - who graced local television screens as a reporter and news presenter on TVNZ and TV3 in the 1990s - has since anchored news roles to an international audience on BBC World, CNN and Fox.
She lives in Turkey, where she is training journalists. She has declined to comment on the rumours the couple had split. "Even were it true, there is no way I would have a personal discussion with a newspaper. So it's a wasted call, really," she said, before hanging up.
When asked whether his marriage was over, Wiig said he would never discuss his private life publicly.
"It's absolutely nobody's business whether I'm still going out with, still married, broken up, or about to chop their head off," Wiig said. "It's nobody's business apart from Anita and myself, and I'm not even going to go there."
But friends of the pair say Wiig recently returned to New Zealand for a brief break after McNaught had told him their marriage was over.
He is now living alone in the couple's country home outside London; he has just bought a canal boat.
Also living in London, his father Reverend Roger Wiig politely declined to comment saying: "You really need to talk to them about it."
