The Western tourists who had been kidnapped and held hostages for about 10 days in the Sahara Desert are safe and sound. The five Italians made it safe back home in Turin via airplane, while other five Germans and a Romania landed in Berlin on a special Lufthansa flight from Egypt.

The group of tourists was seized by kidnappers while they were visiting a remote region of Egypt near the Sudan and Chad border. The kidnappers wanted to obtain a ransom, but half of them were killed when Egyptian or Sudanese special forces intervened and saved the hostages. The salvage operation was carried out on Monday, Egyptian authorities informed.

No ransom was paid.

The tourists were greeted by their families and government officials in both Germany and Italy.

The former hostages gave details about their capture and their release. At one point they thought they were all going to get shot as the kidnappers told the Egyptians to stand in one line and they cocked their weapons. Fortunately, all the 19 hostages were told to leave, but in just one car.  

"We left everything; we didn't even have room for a spare tire. We only had a GPS to go in the right direction until we met the Egyptian special forces around Eight Bells,” Hassan Abdel Hakim, one of the Egyptians who were kidnapped, told The Associated Press.

When abducted, they were forced to stay on their knees at gunpoint, and then taken away, but they were never subjected to physical violence, as Italian tourists Giovanna Quaglia told BBC. The German ex-hostages didn’t speak to the media about the nightmarish ten days yet.

However, the media and official reports about the case are contradictory or in some case complementary. According to some reports, the Sudanese troops were also involved in the rescue operation. They reportedly killed six kidnappers and took two other in custody.

Authorities had negotiated with the kidnappers, who wanted a ransom of $8.8 million, but negotiations stopped after the hostages were freed.