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Ethiopian troops search for five abducted Britons

Ethiopian government troops were scouring a remote and lawless region of the country on Friday night after five Britons with links to the Foreign Office were abducted by a gang of armed men.

The two women and three men were kidnapped after the gang overpowered their guards, torched the guesthouse in which they were staying and set their cars alight. According to eyewitnesses, they were last seen being marched towards the border with Eritrea.

Eight Ethiopians were abducted at the same time, and there were unconfirmed reports that a group of seven French tourists may also have been kidnapped after they apparently disappeared while traveling through the same region.

Local sources said the group were sleeping in a house in Hamadela, a village in the Afar region, known for its salt mines and searing temperatures, when they were surrounded by up to 50 men in military uniforms in the early hours of Thursday morning. The village is understood to be close to a volcano named Erta'Ale, which the group had been planning to visit.

Suspicion for the kidnapping initially fell on Afar separatists who kidnapped a group of Italian tourists in the area during the mid 1990s. They were released unharmed within three weeks.

But a western tour operator in Addis Ababa, who asked not to be named, said eyewitness accounts, including one from a driver who escaped the kidnapping and reported the incident via satellite phone, suggested the Eritrean army might have had a hand in abducting the tourists.

"Two witnesses that I've heard from said the kidnappers were not a rag-tag bunch," the tour operator said.

"They reported that 50 men in military uniforms had marched the tourists away towards the Eritrean border. They were taken on foot at two in the morning from the compound where they were camping, along with a number of local people," he said.

Britain on Friday sent a team of officials to Ethiopia as part of efforts to trace the five people missing.

"We're sending out staff to supplement the embassy staff there," a Foreign Office spokeswoman in London said on Friday, adding that the unspecified number of officials were already en-route for the Ethiopian capital.

The diplomats will bolster numbers in Addis Ababa while embassy staff head to the remote region where the group disappeared, she added.

Britain's national contingencies committee COBRA, which includes the heads of the security services, met to discuss the kidnapping, the British Broadcasting Corp said, indicating a "national security" element to the abductions.

While Beckett did not specify whether the Britons had actually been abducted, she did say that the Ethiopian authorities had promised "to ensure that the situation is resolved peacefully."

As a precaution, Britain amended its travel advice for nationals in or intending to head to the area.
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