KEY POINTS:
Eleven European tourists taken hostage with eight Egyptian guides were on their way home last night after surviving 10 days in some of the most benighted wilderness on the planet n an adventure that apparently culminated in a firefight in which six of their captors were killed.
The freed captives, some gripping bouquets of flowers, smiled as they arrived in Cairo aboard an Egyptian military plane.
Five are Italians, five are Germans and one is Romanian.
One of the tour guides, Sherif Abdel-Moneim, said the armed kidnappers, who spoke broken Arabic, abandoned the group at dawn on Monday "and moments later security forces came and rescued us".
He added: "They told us, 'We won't do anything to you. Once we get the ransom from your governments, you will walk free'."
But much about the tourists' ordeal and rescue remained shrouded in mystery, including the identity of the masked men who seized them at Gilf al-Kebir on 19 September, the motive for their capture and the direction of their subsequent wanderings.
Equally obscure were the circumstances of their liberation.
On Sunday evening, the Sudanese government reported that six of the kidnappers were killed in a failed rescue operation - but barely 12 hours later it was claimed the hostages had turned up safe and well at Egypt's border with Sudan, having been abandoned in the desert by their captors.
The Egyptian defence ministry gave a different version, claiming that 30 special forces soldiers from its elite Lightning Brigade had attacked the kidnappers' camp before dawn, with German and Italian troops standing by.
Other Egyptian sources said a ransom of $6m - compared to the figure of $15m which was originally demanded - bought the Westerners' freedom.
But the Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, denied any ransom was paid.
Speaking in Rome, as opposition politicians demanded a full explanation, he said the hostages were liberated on Egyptian soil "in a transparent manner, without clandestine or secret operations".
"It was an operation of excellent professionalism," he added.
"We have to obviously thank our German friends who worked with us, Egypt as well as Sudan."
The German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said: "I am not going to release any information at this time. Let's wait for the safe return [to Germany] of the hostages."
The 11 tourists were on an adventure holiday in the remotest corner of Egypt.
On the day they vanished they had reached a spot called Gilf al-Kebir, a mighty cliff that rises sheer 3,000ft from the desert floor in the far west of the country, near the unmarked border with Libya and south of the Great Sea of Sand.
The cliff marks the start of a vast arid plateau the size of Switzerland.
Awaiting intrepid visitors to the area are prehistoric rock paintings and relics of the presence of troops during the Second World War, including half-buried vehicles and planes left behind by British troops which attacked German and Italian lines.
This wild region is the haunt of a baffling array of tribal groups and militias.
Gilf al-Kebir is close to conflict zones in Darfur in western Sudan and in eastern Chad, and guerrilla groups with a presence not far away include Darfur's Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement, which has split into six or more factions.
"The region of the Greater Horn of Africa has turned into one of the largest and most violent conflict regions of the world," a regional expert, Gerard Prunier, wrote in a recent report.
"Five international peacekeeping operations are desperately struggling to contain the situation." The myriad different groups in contention are all, he said, "pretty informal and in no way resemble the well-organised guerrilla movements of the communist era".
Which, if any, of these groups was responsible for the capture of the tourists remains unclear.
The group's holiday began when they arrived in Cairo on 13 September.
Five days later, Lorella Paganelli, an Italian tourist, telephoned her sister-in-law in Turin to tell her she would be out of touch for some days because they were heading into the desert on safari.
On 22 September word arrived that the group had been kidnapped.
What happened during their 10 days in the wilderness is hazy, though it seems they were taken across the Egyptian border into into Sudan, then into Libya (a move denied by Tripoli) and finally into war-torn Chad before returning to Egypt and safety.
It is unlikely that the hostages themselves are much clearer about where they went and why.
But one of them n the first to speak to journalists after the rescue yesterday n was in no doubt as to who to thank.
"The Egyptians are a marvellous people," said the unnamed Italian while walking from plane to helicopter at Cairo airport.
"Our guides did their best to make us comfortable in extremely difficult situations."
- THE INDEPENDENT
