Britain sends team to Ethiopia to find missing group

ADDIS ABABA, Mar 3 (Reuters) Britain sent a six-strong team of senior Foreign Office officials to Ethiopia today to step up diplomatic efforts to free foreigners feared kidnapped in a remote area of the Horn of Africa country.

Two groups of tourists, including at least seven French nationals and five Britons, were believed to have been kidnapped in a remote, inhospitable area of Ethiopia where separatist rebels operate.

British officials said five of those missing were members of staff or relatives of members of its staff in Addis Ababa and that a committee convened in emergencies had met yesterday to discuss the situation.

A member of the team sent to Addis Ababa early today who did not want to be identified, said they had come to Addis Ababa to help diplomats at the British embassy in Ethiopia.

A small delegation of embassy staff has already flown to the city of Mekele in the north of the country, which has the closest airport to the area where the Westerners went missing, expatriate sources said.

Foreign Office officials in London declined to say whether hostage negotiators were among the team sent to Ethiopia.

Ethiopian government sources said efforts had been intensified to find the tourists and 13 Ethiopians who police say were kidnapped on Thursday night at a camp by armed people.

''There is an intensive search going on for the Europeans and their Ethiopian crew by our security forces in the regions near where they were kidnapped,'' the source said.

Tour companies said the groups disappeared while visiting the northeast Afar region, considered one of the world's most hostile terrains. The missing Ethiopians were people from the Afar region and were working as drivers and translators.

Afar is one of Ethiopia's poorest regions, populated mostly by roaming herders who scrape a living with sheep and goats.

It was also the site of a low-level rebellion against the government in the 1990s by separatists calling for an Afar state on territory straddling Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti.

REUTERS SP PM1518