Khartoum talking to kidnappers

Cairo: The Sudanese government says it is negotiating with a group of armed men who are holding three Western aid workers hostage in the conflict-ridden Darfur region.

"We think it has been done by a group who has asked for a ransom, and we are negotiating with them," Ali Yousuf, the Foreign Ministry's director-general of protocol said on Friday by telephone from Khartoum.

He refused to give any details about the ransom and said the government would not take any military action that endangered the hostages' lives.

On Thursday, aid agency Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said it was evacuating almost all its staff from Sudan after a Canadian nurse, an Italian doctor and a French coordinator working for its Belgian branch were kidnapped on March 11 from their residential compound in northern Darfur.

Fabienne de Leval, deputy general-director of MSF-Belgium, has now said the evacuations will be out of Darfur only.

The kidnappers contacted MSF on Thursday, through a Sudanese mediator, de Leval said by telephone on Friday from Brussels. "It was just a contact to say everything was fine, and that was it," she said.

MSF has received no ransom requests, she said.

"We heard today that we'll get more information about the whereabouts and the requests that might be coming."

The kidnappings occurred in a government-controlled area, de Leval said, adding that she believed the authorities in Khartoum are "taking it seriously."

The abductions occurred a week after Sudan's government expelled 13 foreign relief organisations for allegedly spying and helping the International Criminal Court, which on March 4 indicted President Omar Al Bashir for war crimes in Darfur. The French and Dutch arms of MSF were among those groups ordered to leave.

After the ICC issued a warrant for Al Bashir's arrest, the government warned that it would expel any foreign organisations proven to be co-operating with the court.

"Whenever we find that an NGO is co-operating with foreign circles, we will just expel them, as we did with the 13," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ali Sadig said on Thursday by telephone from Khartoum. "We do our things the straight way."