By Abdi Sheikh
Reuters
Wednesday, August 26, 2009 2:06 PM
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - One of two French security advisers kidnapped by insurgents in Somalia last month escaped on Wednesday and fled to the presidential palace in Mogadishu.
Police said the former hostage killed three of his captors but Marc Aubriere denied killing anyone and said he slipped away while his guards slept and then walked across the city.
Militants had seized the Frenchmen at a hotel in the capital on July 14 and handed one to the Hizbul Islam rebels and the other to fighters from the al Shabaab group, which Washington describes as al Qaeda's proxy in the Horn of Africa state.
Al Shabaab militants said later that they had taken custody of both men, although that could not be confirmed. Somali government officials at the city's hilltop Villa Somalia palace said the man who escaped was in good health.
"We understand he killed three al Shabaab guys who were guarding him. I cannot understand how this good story happened but now he is in the hands of the government," Abdiqadir Odweyne, a senior police commander, told Reuters.
Somalia's fragile U.N.-backed government faces a stubborn insurgency mounted by al Shabaab and others. The rebels have been joined by foreign jihadists and militants who Western security agencies say are using the country as a safe haven to plot attacks in the region and beyond.
An al Shabaab source confirmed three of its members were killed, but said it was not known by whom. "Three of my friends died but who killed them is the question. We were expecting a ransom this morning," the rebel source said.
One associate of the kidnappers said the Frenchman had been freed after talks with Somali elders, and a senior Somali government source said a ransom had been paid for his release.
"Of course I feel better than one day ago," Aubriere told the BBC Somali Service. "I'm happy and I will soon see my family ... the guards were very tired and sleepy. I didn't kill anyone or injure anyone while escaping," he said.
Adding to confusion over who was holding the pair captive, Aubriere and a French Foreign Ministry spokesman said he had escaped the clutches of Hizbul Islam.
KIDNAPPINGS COMMON "One of the two French hostages found a way to escape from the group detaining him, Hizbul Islam. This was with no violence, no ransom," the ministry's spokesman, Eric Chevallier, told a news conference in Paris.
He said reports any other group had been holding him were wrong, and that the two Frenchmen were advisers on an open, official mission in support of the Somali security forces.
A Somali government official and some media said last month that the pair had been posing as journalists. Chevallier declined to comment on the circumstances of Wednesday's escape.
"France continues to make an effort for the second hostage," he said, declining to give further details for security reasons.
A spokesman for African Union peacekeepers in Mogadishu said Aubriere was transferred from the palace to their base and then boarded a flight to neighboring Kenya at around 1500 GMT.
Mogadishu is one of the world's most dangerous cities and has a history of kidnappings of foreigners, mainly aid workers and journalists. Hostages have normally been released for substantial ransom payments after days or weeks in captivity.
This month, Somali gunmen freed two Kenyans, two French nationals, a Bulgarian and a Belgian abducted in November.
President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed's administration controls only small parts of the lawless country's central region and a few districts of bomb-blasted Mogadishu.
Underlining the insecurity, police said 12 people were killed on Wednesday as guards from the agriculture ministry battled other government forces near the city's K4 junction.
Violence has killed more than 18,000 Somalis since the start of 2007 and driven another 1.4 million from their homes. That has triggered one of the world's worst humanitarian emergencies, with the number of people needing aid leaping 17.5 percent in a year to 3.76 million or half the population.
(Additional reporting by Reuters journalists in Somalia and Kenya, and Tamora Vidaillet and Sophie Hardach in Paris; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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