Viewpoint

Ethiopian security forces examine one of the vehicles used by five people linked to the British embassy in Hamad-Ile, March 5, 2007. Security forces said on Tuesday that the five people, who were kidnapped in Ethiopia’s remote Afar region, had been taken across the border into Eritrea by their captors. Picture taken March 5, 2007. REUTERS/Stringer (ETHIOPIA)

THE trip had been six months in the planning. Almost everyone at the British embassy in Addis Ababa knew the five friends were putting together an expedition through Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression – a scorched land of volcanic cliffs, glittering salt pans and gun-toting tribes.

But as the tour party and their guides slept beneath a star-filled African sky in the tiny stick-and- stone village of Hamedelah, they had little idea that their adventure was only just beginning.

Villagers estimate more than 30 gunmen arrived – some on foot and some on camels – out of the region’s famous salt pans.

They went from hut to hut, rounding up local government officials, policemen and anyone else they thought might be worth a birr or two.

Hussein Darissa, 18, was woken by the commotion. “It seemed that they wanted the financial people in the village and took the faranji [foreigners] almost by accident,” he said.

The four Britons and a French woman were ordered on to their feet from where they slept on the rough ground outside the village guest house.

With barely enough time to put on their shoes, they were marched out of the village, along with about 13 Ethiopians.

The kidnappers stopped only to drop grenades in two of the three 4x4s that had brought the tourists into the searing heat of the Danakil desert.

Then as the hostages crunched their way across the spiky ground of the salt pans, their captors realised that some of the locals were barefoot, making it impossible for them to walk far.

They were released, bringing the last word on their bedraggled party’s destination – the border with Eritrea.

Since then, there has been nothing but rumour and suspicion.

Had they been taken by Eritrean soldiers, intent on framing Ethiopia and raising the profile of the bitter border dispute between the two enemies?

Perhaps Afar separatists had taken them as part of their low-key struggle for independence.

Or had they simply wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time and been picked up by bandits or caught up in a local dispute over salt?

Then yesterday came the first word – eight days after they had been snatched.

It had arrived by the ancient system of “dagu” – the exchange of news as caravans of camels criss-cross the desert carrying salt out of the Danakil, to return with hay from the fertile highlands of Tigray.

Ismail Ali Dero, the general manager of the Afar Pastoralists Development Association, said that word had spread from his tribesmen that the party was alive and well in Eritrea.

He said nomads on the far side of the border had learned that the five were being held by Afar separatists in the town of Weima.

“They will not want to harm them,” Mr Dero said. “They are in Eritrea, but the people who took them were from Afar.”

He pointed the finger at rebels from the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front – the group responsible for kidnapping a party of Italians in 1995.

No-one else is so sure.

Yesterday, the Ethiopian foreign minister confirmed receiving reports that the five had been spotted.

But as he briefed reporters in the Tigrayan city of Mekele, he added: “We don’t even know yet who the kidnappers are.”

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, confirmed that she had also received reports that the hostages were alive.

“We have had indications that people are saying the hostages are OK,” the minister told a news conference in Brussels.

Reports have swirled around Ethiopia that SAS troops have arrived to prepare a rescue operation.

If the captives are in Eritrea, that presents as many political problems as military ones.

But for now, as the group begins its tenth day somewhere in the Danakil’s biblical landscape, where temperatures soar above 40C and volcanic dust swirls between desolate plain and towering cliffs – escape has to start with survival.