Eritrea dismissed as "baseless fabrication" on Sunday accusations by an Ethiopian official that Eritrean forces kidnapped a group of tourists, including Britons and Ethiopians, in a remote part of Ethiopia.

 

The Britons, believed to include diplomats from the British Embassy in Addis Ababa, went missing last week in the remote and inhospitable Afar area in the northeast of the country.

 

Ethiopian police later said 13 Ethiopians who worked for them as drivers and translators were also taken.

 

Ismael Ali Sero, the head of the Afar administration region, said on Saturday that the kidnappers came from Arat military training camp in Eritrea and burned vehicles and two homes before taking the group back to Eritrea.

 

Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu said yesterday Asmara had nothing to do with it and accused Ethiopia of staging it for its own ends in its long-running dispute with its arch-foe.

 

"It is a baseless fabrication. It has nothing to do with Eritrea. It happened inside Ethiopia," he said in Nairobi in a telephone interview.

 

"The Ethiopian regime is trying to exploit it for political prostitution. They always blow up bombs and accuse Eritrea. It is an Ethiopian staged drama."

 

Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a war in 1998-2000 and still dispute their border. Asmara routinely denies accusations of infiltration.

 

The state-run Ethiopian News Agency said Ethiopian security officials reported that five of the Ethiopians had been found, picked up by security forces patrolling the Eritrean border.

 

"According to the official, five of the 13 Ethiopians abducted by armed men last Thursday have joined Ethiopian security forces in the area after they reached the Eritrean border by walking a 3-four hour distance from Hamedilla," it said late on Saturday, quoting an unnamed security source.

 

Hamedilla is a salt market town from where Ismael said the tourists were taken in the middle of the night as they slept.

 

The British government could not comment on the accusation that the hostages were being held by Eritrea. But it said it had sent a team of Foreign Office officials to Ethiopia to step up diplomatic efforts to free the missing people it said were embassy staff or their relatives.

 

"It is a matter of grave importance for the Foreign Office, as it would be with any British tourist," British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon, told British television channel ITV 1.

 

"But obviously staff in the Foreign Office feel particularly strongly because it is their people, their families, and a great deal of effort is being made to secure their freedom."

 

A delegation of British Embassy staff flew to Mekele, which has the closest airport to the area where they went missing. Ethiopia security forces were also combing the area.

 

Afar, one of Ethiopia's poorest regions, was the site of a low-level rebellion against the government in the 1990s by separatists calling for an Afar state on territory straddling Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti.

 

A separate group of seven French tourists also went missing on Thursday. The French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said yesterday they were safe.

 

"They are now in Mekele where a representative of our embassy was able to meet them. We are continuing to check that no other French citizen is in the zone concerned," he said.

 

(China Daily March 5, 2007)