Dispute over salt tax may be behind kidnapping of Britons
Saturday, 10 March 2007
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A dispute over a salt tax could provide the key to the disappearance of a group of Britons in one of the most remote and inhospitable regions on the planet.
The hostages were reported yesterday to be "okay" by the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. But the Foreign Office cautioned that investigators in the arid border region between Ethiopia and Eritrea had still not located the group of five British embassy staff and their relatives and that the report of a sighting remained uncorroborated last night.
Fears for the group's safety mounted last week after their vehicles were discovered in the village of Hamedali, one was apparently riddled with bullets while the other's door had been blown out by a grenade.
However, it has emerged that the four Britons, including one with joint British-Italian citizenship, and a French woman, were abducted from their tent while they slept. "There was no shooting," a senior British official said, adding that concerns would grow over the health of the captives in the searing 50C heat, if their desert ordeal became prolonged.
Witnesses in Hamedali say the attackers - believed to be Afar tribesmen or possibly separatist Afar rebels - first targeted local Ethiopian government tax collectors, stealing money and then burning one of their cars. They later seized the Europeans after tossing a grenade at their two vehicles - causing shrapnel to pepper the second car.
The British tourists were visiting the isolated area which is known for its desolate salt mines, and which lies more than 300 feet below sea level.
The nomadic Muslim Afars earn their livelihood from the salt mines. They resent the imposition of tax, and suspect outsiders of seeking to exploit their wealth.
So among the theories gaining currency as the possible motive, is the suspicion that it may be linked to the Afars' efforts to protect their income. The salt is so valuable to the community that the blocks were once used as money.
The salt traders travel in caravans of camels loaded with blocks of salt bought from the mines for 1.5 Ethiopian birr (9 pence). After a two-week trek from one of the lowest points of Africa in the Danakil depression up to the Tigray highlands, each block can be sold for up to 10 birr.
The rebel Afar Revolutionary Democratic United Front (or "Uguguma") is fighting for the creation of a separate Afar homeland for the population of three million Afars spread between three countries in the Horn of Africa - Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. In 1995, the group captured a group of Italian tourists who were freed after a week.
But British officials say that no group has made contact to claim it is holding the tourists who disappeared last week. They play down suggestions of any possible al-Qa'ida involvement in the remote region.
The Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin said tribal leaders in the remote north-east spotted the group in the Afar region and they "appeared to be well". He said the group were "safe and secure" and in a good condition. But he added: "We don't even know yet who the kidnappers are."
