Monday, January 05, 2009
"The two journalists are free after their ordeals," said the head of Puntland police, Abdullahi Said Samatar on Sunday.
"They're taking some rest now and they will be available later. I'm happy to see them recovering their freedom."
The release was confirmed by the Spanish government in Madrid, whose ambassador to Kenya traveled to Puntland from Nairobi to meet British writer Colin Freeman and Spanish photographer Jose Cendon on Sunday afternoon.
Cendon arrived in Kenya late Sunday, a Spanish foreign ministry spokesman told AFP, adding he would remain overnight at the Spanish ambassador's residence in Nairobi.
The spokesman said he was not sure when Cendon, a freelancer based in Ethiopia who worked for various media outlets including AFP, would return to Spain.
Later Sunday Cendon himself told AFP by phone as he travelled to the Spanish ambassador's residence in Nairobi: "I am very happy to have been released, I feel absolutely fine."
Cendon, 34, and reporter Colin Freeman, 39, of The Sunday Telegraph were working on a piracy story when they were kidnapped November 26 while on their way to the airport in the northern Somali port of Bosasso.
Earlier Sunday Cendon's mother, Maria Carmen Docampo, said his sister Julia was on her way to Kenya to meet up with the photographer and would accompany him home to Spain.
"We are very happy, he is well," she told AFP by telephone from the family's home in the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.
The Foreign Office said: "We can confirm that Colin Freeman has been freed. We are providing him consular assistance."
"We're absolutely fine and delighted to be out. We've absolutely no problems at all either physically or mentally," Freeman said in a report carried on the Daily Telegraph website.
Cendon, a freelance photographer employed by the Telegraph for the assignment, confirmed their good health and said they had both helped each other throughout the ordeal.
"We tried to cheer each other up all the time," he said.
The two men were seized as they drove to the airport at Bosasso in Somalia, along with two Somali journalists who had been assisting them, after having completed their assignment for the Telegraph newspapers and website.
It appeared that they were seized by the bodyguards escorting them to the airport, the Telegraph said.
They were held in mountains south-west of the port city and were occasionally moved as their kidnappers tried to dodge rival gangs or discovery by the authorities. They lived in caves and were generally well treated by their abductors.
"We survived on rice, goat meat and Rothmans," said Freeman. "I gave up smoking in 1992 and somehow decided now would be a good time to start up again."
The semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northern Somalia serves as base for pirates who are blamed for over 100 attacks on ships off Somali waters throughout 2008.
Regional governor Musa Gueleh Yusuf said at the end of November that police suspected the involvement of the two Somalis. There was no news Sunday of their whereabouts.
While there was no claim of responsibility for the abductions, Puntland's deputy minister for ports Abdulkebir Musa said in the days following their kidnapping that the journalists had been held in a territory controlled by a clan figure with close links to pirates.
Britain and Spain had set up a crisis cell to assist police in negotiations, which began with local elders within days of their disappearance.
Asked
if a ransom had been paid for the release of the two men, Moratinos
said only that the role of the Spanish government had been limited to
using diplomatic channels to try to secure their freedom.
SOURCE: AFP, Monday, January 05, 2009