CAIRO (AFP) — Egypt has sent a team to Sudan to try to secure the release of 19 people including European tourists kidnapped in the remote south and taken into the Sudanese desert, a security official said on Tuesday.
"Egypt has sent intelligence officers to Sudan where they are working with the Sudanese authorities to secure the hostages' release," the official told AFP, requesting anonymity.
The 11 foreigners -- five Italians, five Germans and a Romanian -- as well as eight Egyptian guides, drivers and a guard were snatched at gunpoint by masked men while on desert safari in Egypt's remote southwest on Friday.
Cairo said on Monday they had been taken into Sudan and that the authorities were "in contact with the Sudanese side to release the tourists."
The kidnappers want a ransom of up to 15 million dollars, Tourism Minister Zuhair Garana said. Unconfirmed reports say they have threatened the hostages with death if there is military intervention to free them.
Garana said the group was being held in the Sudanese part of Karak Talh, a rugged and largely uninhabited region straddling Egypt, Sudan and Libya, having started their safari near Gilf el-Kabir , just north of the border with Sudan.
Egypt has denied negotiating directly with the kidnappers, with Garana saying Germany is in touch with them. Berlin has not commented.
Egypt was forced to deny a statement by its own Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit in New York on Monday that all 19 had been freed, dashing hopes of a swift end to the drama.
"Egyptian efforts are ongoing to release the abducted tourists," the state news agency MENA quoted an unnamed official as saying after Abul Gheit said the group had been released "safe and sound."
Romanian ambassador to Cairo Gheorghe Dumitrou told AFP the situation was unchanged on Tuesday. An Italian source in Cairo said the missing Italians were three women and two men, some in their 70s.
Egypt's independent Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper quoted an unnamed security official as saying that one kidnapper called "a wife of an Egyptian telling her that he would kill the tourists if the state tried to save them militarily."
It was not possible to confirm the threat.
The tourism ministry in Egypt -- which relies heavily on earnings from foreign visitors -- stressed that "this is an act of banditry not of terrorism."
"Four masked gunmen attacked four vehicles affiliated to a tourist company. They kidnapped the tourists and led them to the Sudanese lands," MENA quoted the ministry as saying.
Authorities only became aware of the abduction when the tour company owner, an Egyptian who is among the missing, used a satellite telephone to call his German wife and tell her of the ransom demand.
MENA said he called again late on Monday to tell her they were "safe and sound."
A spokesman for Sudan's Northern State, which borders Egypt and Libya to the north and west and the war-torn Darfur region to the south, told AFP that "until now we have no information about this".
Some of the many rebel factions from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, less than 300 kilometres (190 miles) south of the Egypt-Sudan border, have also denied involvement.
The area of the kidnapping is a desert plateau famous for prehistoric cave paintings, including the "Cave of the Swimmers" featured in the 1996 film "The English Patient."
One travel agent told AFP that in January a German group was attacked and robbed in the same area. They were abandoned in the desert with nothing but a satellite telephone. It is not known who carried out that attack.
Kidnappings of foreigners are extremely rare in Egypt, although in 2001 an armed Egyptian held four German tourists hostage for three days in Luxor, demanding that his estranged wife bring his two sons back from Germany. He freed the hostages unharmed.
Egypt has, however, witnessed a number of deadly attacks against foreigners which have been blamed on Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants.
The most recent occurred between 2004 and 2006 in popular Red Sea resorts, killing dozens.
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