Ethiopian police say finding UK hostages is race against time

ETHIOPIA: Ethiopian police said they were facing an increasingly desperate race against time yesterday to find five Britons …

ETHIOPIA:Ethiopian police said they were facing an increasingly desperate race against time yesterday to find five Britons missing in the remote Danakil desert of north-eastern Ethiopia.

The three men and two women, who are all connected to the British embassy in Addis Ababa, enter their seventh day held hostage in a region where food, water and medicines are all but impossible to find.

Zeamanuel Legesse, police commissioner of Tigray province, said he had despatched additional men to help the search in the neighbouring province of Afar as time began to run out. Europeans would find it next to impossible to cope with temperatures that can reach 50 degrees. "It is so very difficult to move around in that desert and if you stand still, you will melt," he said in the regional capital Mekele.

"It is so remote that it is difficult to get information, so we are sending as many people as we can to the border region."

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The five Britons were staying in the tiny village of Hamedelah, about 800km (500 miles) from Addis Ababa, when they were snatched by unknown assailants.

The gunmen used grenades to disable their vehicles after rounding up the hostages in the early hours of Thursday. The kidnappers have yet to make contact with either the Ethiopian or British governments.

Several pairs of hiking boots were among the personal items left in the vehicles, suggesting they would have been poorly equipped to cope with days spent in the Ethiopian desert.

The land here sinks to 100m (330ft)below sea-level. A desiccating wind cuts across a scorched landscape of volcanic rock where nothing grows.

Even the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, no stranger to extremes of climate and terrain, described the vast Afar region as a "veritable land of death" - as much for its peoples' fondness for guns as its blistering temperatures.

Tony Hickey, a tour operator who supplied the missing group with a cook and guide, said survival was possible.

"It's going to be tough but there are places where water is available. At the end of the day, they are with people who know how to survive there."

Meanwhile, the UN mission tasked with monitoring a buffer zone along the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, offered its help to the search effort.

"The mission stands ready to assist with medical and logistical support, if and when the need arises," the force spokeswoman, Musi Khumalo, told the AFP news agency in the Eritrean capital, Asmara.

Comdr Legesse, in common with other Ethiopian officials, pointed the finger squarely at the Eritrean government, saying he believed their soldiers were responsible for the kidnapping. The claims have been denied by Eritrea.

It is understood that British Foreign Office investigators based in the town of Mekele have largely dismissed any Eritrean involvement along with rumours that the attackers were linked with Somalia's recently defeated Islamic courts or al-Qaeda. Instead attention is now focusing on the packs of Afar bandits that have harassed tourists in the past.

"There are plenty of smokescreens going up - with al-Qaeda and the Eritreans - but if I was a betting man, I would put money on it being down to local gangs or Afar separatists," said a western diplomatic source familiar with the region.

Bandits operate in the Afar region, where separatists started a low-level rebellion in the early 1990s.