Kidnapped French journalist is said to be “fine”

By Mohamed Olad Hassan | December 17, 2007

MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — A French journalist who was kidnapped by armed gunmen in northern Somalia is “safe and fine” and negotiations were under way to free him, the region’s deputy governor said Monday.

“We have sent clan elders to secure the release of the journalist,” Yusuf Mumin Bidde told The Associated Press by telephone from Somalia’s Puntland region. “He is safe and fine. We are hopeful that he will be released soon.”

The reporter, cameraman Gwen Le Gouil, was kidnapped Sunday morning in the semiautonomous region in northern Somalia. The area is relatively stable in a country beset by chaos and violence, but in recent months it has increasingly become associated with rampant piracy off its coast. In May, three aid workers were kidnapped and released there after negotiations between their captors and clan elders, who are highly influential in Somalia.

Le Gouil, 32, was working on a story on trafficking in illegal migrants, said Jean Laurent, who worked with Le Gouil in small Nairobi-based TV company, Cargo-Culte Productions.

Le Gouil was kidnapped just outside the port city of Bossaso, which is the main departure point for tens of thousands of Somalis who pay smugglers to ferry them across the Gulf of Aden. The destination is Yemen and onward to richer Arab countries. The trip can be deadly — on Sunday, the international aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres said the bodies of 56 people who recently set off from Bossaso washed up on shore in Yemen.

Without citing sources, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said Sunday it appeared Le Gouil’s kidnappers were demanding US$70,000 (euro48,000). Reporters Without Borders said he had been seized by people involved in smuggling illegal immigrants.

French authorities were in contact with “those who seem to be the kidnappers,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Sunday from Paris. “I hope that the contact will not be lost and I hope that it only concerns a demand for ransom,” he said in a television broadcast.

The area where the reporter was kidnapped is about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, which is at the center of an Islamic insurgency that has killed thousands of people this year.

Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991. Last week, a director at the country’s Security Ministry said a radical Islamic group that was driven from power one year ago by a Western-supported offensive is making a significant comeback in Somalia and the government can do little to stop it.

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AP Writers Mohamed Sheikh Nor in Mogadishu, Somalia and Malkhadir M. Muhumed in Nairobi, Kenya contributed to this report.