Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey has held talks with her Algerian counterpart on the earthquake in Algeria and the fate of European tourists taken hostage in the Sahara desert, the Swiss foreign ministry said Sunday. The talks were held Saturday at Switzerland's mission to the UN in Geneva.
The two ministers discussed proposals for ensuring the safe return of the tourists - 10 Germans, four Swiss and a Dutchman - who went missing during the winter in the Algerian Sahara and are thought to have been taken hostage by an Islamist extremist group, a ministry spokesman said, cited by AFP.
Algerian Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem, for his part, assured Calmy-Rey that the Algerian authorities would do everything in their power to accommodate the Swiss concerns in the matter, he said. (Albawaba.com)
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