Two European aid workers held captive for more than a year in Niger have been freed in Libya and are due to fly home on Thursday, officials said, bringing a long-running kidnapping ordeal to a close without releasing extensive detail on the circumstances of their captivity or release.
The women, from Switzerland and Austria, were reportedly abducted while carrying out humanitarian work in Niger, a country that has seen a sharp deterioration in security since a 2023 military coup cut off much of its cooperation with Western governments and left large swaths of its territory contested by armed groups, including affiliates of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Kidnappings of foreign aid workers, journalists and contractors have become a recurring hazard across the wider Sahel region in recent years, as weakened central governments have struggled to secure vast, sparsely populated border areas.
Niger's neighbor Libya, itself fractured by more than a decade of conflict and competing governments since the 2011 overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, has at times served as a transit point for hostages moved across porous regional borders, though officials did not detail how the two women came to be released there rather than in Niger itself. Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly warned that the deteriorating security situation across the Sahel is making it increasingly difficult and dangerous to deliver aid to some of the world's most vulnerable populations, even as need in the region continues to grow.