Kidnap Britons Sighted in Eritrea

The five Britons kidnapped in Ethiopia were sighted yesterday in an Eritrean army camp, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the border between the countries.

The sighting, in a camp near the village of Ara-Ta, confirms that the Britons are being held by Eritrean soldiers and not local people and suggests there has been a dramatic escalation in tensions between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

British sources in Ethiopia confirmed the sighting of the five Foreign Office and British Council workers who were travelling in the area. The sources said the kidnap represented a calculated effort by the Eritreans to destabilise the border.

There have been tensions between both countries for some time. Last month the Ethiopian government broadcast an image of a bomb which it said had been constructed in Eritrea and was intended to be detonated at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa.

The Ethiopian government also claimed that Eritrea was responsible for a series of explosions last year in which four Ethiopians died. But locals say the kidnapping of foreign nationals represents an escalation of the conflict.

The Afar region, an arid, remote region of north Ethiopia where the Britons were seized, has begun to attract a growing tourist trade due to its rich birdlife and sulphur lakes. The Eritrean government has sponsored militant groups in the region with the aim of stifling the tourist trade, local people say.

One Ethiopian source predicted that the Eritreans would use the British hostages as leverage against the international community: 'They will say the world has been too soft on Ethiopia, that it's unstable, and that there's a lot of opposition within the country. They want to stifle investment in the country.'

Last night politicians expressed concern at the news. 'I'm shocked,' said Derek Wyatt, a Labour MP and member of the all-party parliamentary group on Ethiopia. 'This is not the way Eritrea usually operates: if this is them it might signal a new way of undertaking conflict with Ethiopia. We need to think of a response and not rush in or we could create fighting on both borders.'

A contingent of United Nations troops in the region had been diverted to the Somalia border, making the region more unsafe, according to politicians.

It had been suggested that a party of French tourists was seized with the Britons, but conflicting reports from local people said they had either been released or had never been kidnapped.

It emerged last night that the Britons had ignored explicit Ethiopian government advice not to travel in the area. As a specialist 10-strong rapid deployment team, which included a hostage negotiator and medical staff, landed in Ethiopia yesterday to help co-ordinate the search, the Foreign Office insisted that it had warned travellers not to enter the region due to fears about the Eritrean army.

'We advise against all travel within 20km of the Eritrean border in the Tigray and Afar regions,' the Foreign Office website said in a statement issued months earlier.

Sources in Ethiopia told The Observer that the five Britons, two women and three men, were marched across the border on Friday night after being seized in a compound in Dalol in the Afar region.

'There were about 50 soldiers, dressed in uniforms,' said one source who had spoken to eye witnesses at the scene. 'They torched the house belonging to the owner of the compound and took him with the Britons.'

The war's history

Eritrea was once a province of Ethiopia, its larger landlocked neighbour. It was annexed in 1933, suffered a civil war until 1991 and gained independence in 1993. They have a fractious relationship, and were at war from 1998 to 2000; 100,000 died. Tensions remain over borders. One of the main reasons behind Ethiopia's decision to enter Somalia in December was her desire to show its strength to Eritrea. Meanwhile, the UN accused Eritrea of providing support to Somalia's ruling Islamic Courts Union to destabilise Ethiopia.

Tracy McVeigh