A group of European tourists who were kidnapped by armed bandits in the remote deserts of southern Egypt have been freed after a raid that left half of their captors dead, Egyptian officials said yesterday.

A force of 30 elite Egyptian troops, accompanied by Italian and German special forces, raided the kidnappers’ camp to release the five Italians, five Germans and one Romanian who were abducted with eight Egyptian guides while on a 4x4 vehicle safari of the desert near the Sudanese border.

The hostages were flown to Cairo for medical examinations and emerged from their military flight smiling to receive garlands of flowers.

Details about how the raid was conducted, and even where it took place, were still hazy last night. A Sudanese official said that the hostages had been abandoned before the rescue mission was begun, and that Sudan’s own forces had fought the kidnap gang near the Egyptian and Libyan border the day before. That statement was partially borne out by one of the guides, who said that his captors had been a group of about 17 gunmen who spoke broken Arabic.

Sherif Abdel-Moneim said that the gang had treated the group well but abandoned them at dawn yesterday. “Moments later security forces came and rescued us,” he said. The gunmen had told them that they meant the group no harm, he said. “They told us: ‘We won’t do anything to you. Once we get the ransom from your governments, you will walk free’. ”

An Egyptian official said that half of the kidnappers had been killed in a gun battle. “Just before dawn two helicopters flew in special forces from the elite Lightning Brigade who freed the hostages. There was a gunfight during which half the around 35 kidnappers were killed and the rest escaped.”

The abduction had been a serious embarrassment to the Egyptian Government, which relies on foreign tourism for revenue and has tried to protect visitors after a series of deadly al-Qaeda hotel bombings in Sinai in the past five years. The incident appeared to have been financially motivated, blamed by some on a small Sudanese rebel group hoping to extort as much as $15 million (£8.4 million).

Zoheir Garrana, the Egyptian Tourism Minister, who met the liberated hostages at the airport, said that no ransom had been paid. “We will coordinate with security agencies to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said as the tourists boarded army helicopters to fly to a military hospital, where they were able to call their families.

“They seemed exhausted but said there was no ill-treatment. They seemed elated to be free,” a Tourism Ministry official said.

Franco Frattini, the Italian Foreign Minister, said that his country had sent special forces to take part in the rescue mission. “It was an operation of excellent professionalism. We have to obviously thank our German friends who worked with us, Egypt as well as Sudan,” he said.

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