ABU SIMBEL, Egypt: Sudan said yesterday it knows the location of 11 European tourists and eight Egyptians kidnapped while on a Sahara desert safari, but there were no immediate plans for a rescue operation.
The kidnappers are believed to be desert tribesman who seized the tourists in a remote corner of Egypt and took them across the border to Sudan. They are demanding up to $15 million in ransom.
The kidnappers and their captives are in the desert of northwest Sudan about 24 kms from the Egyptian border, Youssef said. He said an Egyptian intelligence team had arrived in Sudan. “There are no plans to storm the area as we are only concerned about the lives of kidnapped,” Youssef told the official SUNA news agency. “One senior Egyptian security official said members of tribes in the Egypt’s Western Desert and near the border were being questioned.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
It was the first such abduction of tourists in Egypt, a country that was plagued in the 1990s by militant bombings and shooting against tourists.
The militant violence was largely suppressed a decade ago, and Egyptian officials underlined that the kidnapping was not connected to terrorism, but was by “criminals” seeking ransom. It was more unusual because it took place not in the well-traveled pharaonic sites along the Nile River, but at one of Egypt’s most remote and little-visited natural attractions in the remote southwest corner of Egypt, near the Libyan and Sudanese borders.
The tourists were visiting Gilf Al-Kebir, an isolated plateau in the Sahara desert famed for its prehistoric cave paintings. Best known is the “Cave of the Swimmers,” immortalized in the 1996 movie “The English Patient,” featuring 10,000-year-old paintings of people swimming, a hallmark of an ancient time when scientists think parts of the Sahara were covered by lakes and rivers.
