UK Welcomes Freed Embassy Staff 🇬🇧

(15 Mar 2007)
++MUTE++
1. Freed hostages walking down stairs from aeroplane with family members
2. Freed hostages walking across tarmac with family members
3. Two people embracing
4. People walking away from plane
STORYLINE
Five Europeans, taken hostage for 13 days by a group in Ethiopia arrived back in Britain on Thursday after they were released.
They hugged family members after landing at the Brize Norton Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire.
The five said on Wednesday, after their release, that they had been treated well by their captors, but gave no details on who had kidnapped them or why.
The Europeans who were kidnapped are: Peter Rudge, first secretary of the British embassy in Addis Ababa; embassy worker Jonathan Ireland; Malcolm Smart and Frenchwoman Laure Beaufils of the Department for International Development; and Moore's wife, Rosanna Moore, an Anglo-Italian.
They had been released on Tuesday in neighbouring Eritrea before being flown to Ethiopia to be reunited with family and friends. All five worked for or had links with the British Embassy in Addis Ababa.
In a statement released on their behalf by the British Embassy, the five said they were treated well by their captors and were immensely happy they had been released.
The hostages were in the remote Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia when they were seized at gunpoint along with 13 Ethiopians.
There was no information on the fate of the Ethiopian hostages.

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