A French woman who was abducted in Yemen in February has been freed, the French president’s office said early on Friday, adding that she would return to France in the coming hours.
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In June an authenticated video emerged which showed Isabelle Prime in distress appealing to the French president for her release.
Isabelle Prime, 31, was working in Yemen as a consultant on a World Bank funded project when she was kidnapped.
Details of Prime’s release, including what group had been holding her, weren’t divulged Friday. Prime was seized along with her translator, Sherine Makkaoui, who was freed in Aden on March 10.
The Omani foreign ministry said efforts by Oman “in coordination with certain Yemeni parties” had helped track her down.
Dressed in black, she appealed to President Francois Hollande and the Yemeni authorities to arrange her release because she was “really, really tired”. “I tried to kill myself several times”.
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius spoke to Prime by phone, he said in a statement.
Recently, tribesmen in Yemen have kidnapped foreigners as a means of putting pressure on the government to provide them with better services or to release jailed relatives.
Yemen is also home to one of the most active branches of al-Qaida, to which tribal kidnappers have reportedly often sold their kidnapped victims.
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Prior to Prime’s release, the most recent French hostage to be freed was Serge Lazarevic in December last year, after he spent three years in the hands of Islamist militants in Mali.
