Eritrea dismissed as "baseless fabrication" today accusations by an Ethiopian official that Eritrean forces kidnapped a group of tourists, including Britons and Ethiopians, in a remote part of Ethiopia.
The Britons, believed to include diplomats from the British embassy in Addis Ababa, went missing last week in the remote and inhospitable Afar area in the northeast of Ethiopia.
Ethiopian police later said 13 Ethiopians who worked for them as drivers and translators were also taken.
Ismael Ali Sero, the head of the Afar administration region told Reuters on Saturday that the kidnappers came from Arat military training camp in Eritrea and burned vehicles and two homes before taking the group back to Eritrea.
Eritrean Information Minister Ali Abdu said today Asmara had nothing to do with it and accused Ethiopia of staging the incident for its own ends in its long-running dispute with its arch-foe.
"It is a baseless fabrication. It has nothing to do with Eritrea. It happened inside Ethiopia," he told Reuters in Nairobi by telephone.
Meanwhile, the state-run Ethiopian News Agency said Ethiopian security officials reported that five of the Ethiopians had been found, picked up by security forces patrolling the Eritrean border.
"According to the official, five of the 13 Ethiopians abducted by armed men last Thursday have joined Ethiopian security forces in the area after they reached the Eritrean border by walking a three-four hour distance from Hamedilla," it said late last night, quoting an unnamed security source.
Hamedilla is a salt market town from where the tourists were taken in the middle of the night as they slept, Sero said.
The British government could not comment on the reports that hostages were being held by Eritrea. But it said it had sent a team of Foreign Office officials to Ethiopia to step up diplomatic efforts to free the missing people it said were embassy staff or their relatives.