Three German climbers who were held hostage for 12 days after being abducted by Kurdish rebels in eastern Turkey arrived safely home in Germany on Monday on a scheduled airline flight, according to dpa. Security sources at Munich airport said they arrived on a Lufthansa flight from Ankara. Lars Holger Renne, 33, Martin Georg S., 47, and Helmut Johann H., 65, all from Bavaria, were abducted on July 8 by five Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) guerrillas who raided a 3,200-metre camp on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman said the PKK freed the Germans on Sunday in a mountainous area, where they were found by Turkish police who had been searching for them. "Half-an-hour after their release our forces came and took charge of them," Mehmet Cetin, governor of Agri province where Mount Ararat is located, said. Neither Germany nor Turkey has fully explained what prompted their release, but the German Foreign Ministry praised Monday their close cooperation during the crisis. The three Alpine mountaineers had been part of a 13-member expedition attempting to scale Turkey's highest mountain when they were abducted. The others in the party were left unharmed and returned to Germany three days after the incident.
