French hostages freed in Yemen head for home

Three French hostages kidnapped by Al-Qaeda militants in Yemen more than five months ago were on their way home on Monday after being freed on payment of a ransom, tribal sources said. "We, the three of us, are very thankful to his majesty Sultan Qaboos of Oman for his involvement and all the efforts deployed to lead us to freedom and we are very grateful for the great hospitality we have had during our stay in Oman," one of the hostages told reporters on arrival in the capital. "We are very happy to go back to our families and to be finally free," he said, reading a statement. The trio -- two women and a man -- arrived at Al-Seeb airbase near Muscat on an Omani military plane at around midday (0800 GMT), and gave a brief statement before boarding a French plane to Paris. They have not been identified. The former hostages were greeted at the military airbase by France's ambassador to Oman, Malika Berak, who said the French citizens were healthy and thanked Sultan Qaboos for his efforts in securing their release. The aid workers flew in from the Omani city of Salalah, about 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) south of the capital and near the border with Yemen, a tribal official involved in their release told AFP. The male hostage sported a beard and one of the women was wearing a long skirt while the other wore pants. A Yemeni businessman, Ahmed ben Ferid al-Souraimeh, who was exiled to Oman in the 1990s and who worked for the hostages' release, accompanied the French citizens on the plane.  On Monday, a tribal source told AFP that the hostages had travelled to Salalah by car from where they were being held in Yemen's Shabwa province. In a telephone interview after the aid workers boarded a plane to Paris, tribal chief Ali Abdel Salam said he had the task of ensuring all three hostages were driven safely from Al-Qaeda strongholds in Yemen's lawless regions across the border to Oman. "I drove all three of them, one at a time, accompanied by my two brothers," he said. The process of releasing the captives held by Al-Qaeda since May 28 began last Tuesday and only ended when the last hostage was handed over to Omani officials on Saturday night. The aid workers disappeared on May 28 and, according to a tribal source who helped arrange their freedom, were moved to several different hide-outs in their months of captivity. They were kidnapped in Yemen's Hadramawt province and remained captive in the town of Seyun, 600 kilometres (370 miles) east of Sanaa, for several weeks before being moved to a farm in Loder, an Al-Qaeda stronghold in the restive Abyan province. But an increase in attacks by US drones on suspected Al-Qaeda targets forced the kidnappers to "relocate the hostages to Al-Kour," a barren mountainous region that straddles Abyan and Shabwa provinces, the tribal source told AFP. Al-Kour has served as the hide-out for several top leader's of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and was used by US cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi, who was killed in a suspected US drone strike on September 30. The tribal source said the hostages were then transferred to the town of Azzan, another Al-Qaeda hub, before their final relocation to Shabwa's capital Ataq. On Monday, a tribal chief who led the mediation efforts with Al-Qaeda said a "ransom was paid" to secure the release of the hostages but he did not reveal the amount or say who paid it.  However, France insisted on Monday that it had not paid a ransom for their release. "We do not pay ransoms," French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said during a press conference. The former hostages were members of the French NGO Triangle Generation Humanitaire which expressed "huge relief" after receiving news of their release but declined to name the three, saying only they were aged between 25 and 30. It remains unclear what role Oman played in securing their release. In September, the Gulf state paid the ransom for two US hikers held by Iran for more than two years. Local Yemeni sources said Monday that the Al-Awalaq tribe led negotiations with Fahd al-Qusso, a tribal member and AQAP head wanted by the United States for his attack on the USS Cole in Aden in October 2000 that killed 17 seamen. Tribes in Yemen have often kidnapped foreigners to pressure the authorities into making concessions. More than 200 foreigners have been abducted over the past 15 years, with almost all of them later freed unharmed.