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Search for Germans in Sahara
05/04/2003 22:01 - (SA)
Berlin - German federal police investigators were set on Sunday to join a search in the vast wastes of Algeria's Sahara desert for 20 tourists, some missing without trace since as far back as the end of February, the foreign ministry said on Saturday.
Fifteen Germans, four Swiss and one Dutchman disappeared in the Sahara desert while on a tourist trip, a ministry spokesperson said.
Earlier reports had spoken of 16 Germans missing.
The spokesperson said five officers of Germany's Federal Investigation Bureau, the BKA, were set to depart on Sunday for Algiers to take part in investigations.
A BKA liaison officer is already on the scene.
The tourist group had been driving around the desert which has hitherto been spared the Islamic fundamentalist violence that has swept other parts of Algeria in the last decade.
The area in which they have disappeared covers two million square kilometres - or four-fifths of the Algerian territory.
Diplomats say the missing group had not been heard of or seen since the end of February despite searches by helicopters using heat detector systems in case bodies and vehicles should have been buried by sand.
Germany said Friday it was "very concerned" about the fate of its nationals and had set up a crisis cell to handle the situation.
Bands of arms and drug smugglers are known to roam Algeria's southern Sahara, where they traffic in contraband across the porous borders with Niger and Libya. Some are thought to have links to a group of Islamic extremists.
Eleven of the group went missing on February 21. Others were last heard of on March 8 and 17.
- AFX
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