BRUSSELS (AFP) — Somali-born model turned rights campaigner Waris Dirie has been found alive two days after she went missing in Brussels prompting a police hunt, Belgian authorities said Friday.
The 43-year-old naturalised Austrian, a UN ambassador in the campaign against female genital mutilation, went missing in the early hours of Wednesday after getting into a taxi outside a hotel in the Belgian capital.
A spokesman for the local prosecutor's office said she had been found in Brussels on Friday afternoon, but he could give no immediate information on where she had been since she went missing or on her physical state.
The Belga news agency reported that Dirie had been found "safe and sound".
Dirie disappeared after she had become lost in the Belgian capital and had been helped by police, who mistakenly took her to a hotel from the same chain as the one she was staying in but at which she had no reservation, an Austrian foreign ministry spokesman said in Vienna.
Earlier in the day Belgian authorities launched an appeal for witnesses, hoping to get in touch with the taxi driver or anyone who knew of her whereabouts.
Dirie had been expected in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, on Friday to receive the Euriade Foundation prize. She was also due to take part in a conference in Brussels on Saturday, International Women's Day, on female circumcision.
Dirie was attacked in her home in Vienna in March 2004 by a Portuguese man who had become obsessed with her and followed her more than 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) from her former home in the Welsh capital Cardiff.
As a UN goodwill ambassador, she was to attend a conference on genital mutilation in Brussels to mark international women's day on Saturday, and on Friday had been due to visit Kerkrade in the Netherlands to receive a prize.
In addition to modelling work, Dirie was known for writing four books of memoirs and she had a minor role in the 1987 James Bond movie, "The Living Daylights".
Her memoirs relate her story of enduring genital mutilation as a young girl before fleeing her home country after being married off at the age of 13.
Her disappearance came less than a month after another African-born model who campaigned against female circumcision, Katoucha Niane, was found floating drowned in the river Seine in Paris.
Niane's autopsy found no signs of violence, but her family filed a court complaint in Paris on Friday alleging voluntary homicide, a judicial source said. The alleged culprit was not named in the complaint.
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