MOGADISHU (AFP) — Four journalists kidnapped in Somalia's breakaway Puntland state, including a Briton and a Spaniard, have been located and police have been deployed to the area, Puntland authorities said on Saturday.
Regional governor Musa Gueleh Yusuf said police had been deployed around the hideout where the journalists were being held, but did not specify the location.
"Now we have the full information. The policemen are around their hideout. After two, three hours, they'll have the hostages with them," said Gueleh, the governor of Bossaso region where the four were seized.
"They know exactly their location and we have information that the hostages are OK, guarded by seven kidnappers," he said, adding that some 60 policemen had been deployed.
The journalists, who were abducted on Wednesday on their way from a hotel in the Puntland economic capital Bosasso to the airport, were investigating piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
Puntland police chief Lieutenant Colonel Gani Mohamed Haji also said the journalists had been located and security men sent to the area would "surround them (kidnappers) and free the journalists."
On Friday, the region's officials said they opened negotiations with elders and were probing the circumstances of the abduction.
But Gueleh said the authorities suspected possible involvement in the kidnapping by the two Somali journalists who were snatched at the same time and had been assisting the two foreign journalists during their one-week stay.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the abduction, the latest in a string of kidnappings and attacks targeting foreign journalists and aid workers in Somalia, a country ravaged by conflict and starvation.
Puntland's deputy minister for seaports Abdulkebir Musa said the foreign journalists were being held in a territory controlled by a sub-clan with close links to pirates, who have ramped up attacks on vessels in recent months.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said this week his country and Britain had formed crisis cells to "find a solution as quickly as possible."
The war-wracked Horn of Africa nation was ranked as the world's second-deadliest country for journalists throughout 2007 by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
In August, two freelance journalists, an Australian and a Canadian, were kidnapped near the capital Mogadishu and are still being held.
In December 2007, French cameraman Gwen Le Gouil was kidnapped and held for eight days by a local militia. Security sources in Puntland have said that the men who kidnapped him are responsible for this week's abduction.
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