Three German climbers who were held hostage
for 12 days after being abducted by Kurdish rebels in eastern Turkey arrived safely home in Germany on Monday on a scheduled airline flight.
One of them, Lars Holger Reime, said, "It was a tough time. But we've come
through it relatively well."
A German newspaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said Germany's foreign
intelligence agency BND negotiated direct via its own channels with the
Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) abductors after Turkey and the Kurds had been
unable to agree to any mediator.
In a report to appear Tuesday, it said a BND delegation set out for the
kidnapping scene, Mount Ararat, and were halted by Turkish authorities before
the German Foreign Ministry intervened to have them let through.
After the airline flight from Ankara, Reime said the trio had been relatively
well treated by the abductors.
"So physically we're fairly okay. We're going to need a few days to
recover psychologically. We have to let it settle a bit."
Thanking German officials, he added that the trio were grateful to the Turkish
government for avoiding any military intervention.
"One of our greatest worries was that we would get caught up in fighting
or something like that. Thank God that didn't happen."
Reime, Martin Georg S, 47, and Helmut Johann H, 65, all from Bavaria, were
abducted on July 8 by five PKK guerrillas who raided a 3,200-metre camp on
Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey.
A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman said the PKK freed the Germans on Sunday
in a mountainous area, where they were found by Turkish police who had been
searching for them.
"Half-an-hour after their release our forces came and took charge of
them," Mehmet Cetin, governor of Agri province where Mount Ararat is
located, said.
Neither Germany nor Turkey has fully explained what prompted their release, but
the German Foreign Ministry praised Turkish officials for their understanding
during the crisis.
The Sueddeutsche newspaper said the negotiations with the PKK had never
involved any ransom.
The three alpine mountaineers had been part of a 13-member expedition
attempting to scale Turkey's highest mountain when they were abducted. The
others in the party were left unharmed and returned to Germany three days after the incident.
The PKK in a statement last week said they had carried out the abductions in
protest at the German government's "hostile polices" against the
group, threatening that it could target German economic interests in Turkey.
Last month, the German Interior Ministry banned the Kurdish
satellite-television broadcaster Roj TV because of its links to the PKK, which
is outlawed as a terrorist organization in the European Union and the United States.
Ankara blames the separatist group for the deaths of more than 32,000 people
since the early 1980s when the PKK began its fight for independence or autonomy
for the mainly Kurdish-populated south-east of Turkey, dpa reported.