Authorities know the whereabouts of kidnappers who seized 19 hostages in the Egyptian desert, but have no plans for any rescue operation that could harm the captives, a Sudanese Foreign Ministry official said on Tuesday. Masked kidnappers snatched the hostages – five Italians, five Germans, a Romanian and eight Egyptians – from a desert safari near Egypt's southern border with Sudan and Libya on Friday and were thought to have whisked them out of Egypt. The kidnappers have threatened to kill the hostages if authorities try to find them by plane, an Egyptian official with strong ties to security agencies said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But Egypt's tourism minister denied there was any such threat, state news agency MENA reported. “The location of the kidnappers has been pinpointed... It's no-man's land between the Sudan, Libya and Egypt borders,” said Mutrif Siddig, Sudanese undersecretary of foreign affairs. “We are not going to have an operation that harms the hostages,” he added, noting Khartoum was coordinating with Egyptian authorities on the case. The kidnapping of foreign tourists was the first of its kind in Egypt, and posed a new challenge to the security-conscious government in a country that depends on foreign tourism for 6 percent of the national economy. Islamic militants hit the country's tourist industry in the 1990s and again in the mid-2000s with bomb and gun attacks that killed hundreds of people and weighed heavily on tourism.
