ITALIAN ISLAMIC STATE CAPTIVES FREED IN LIBYA, 2 FEARED DEAD

CAIRO: Two Italian hostages have been freed from Islamic State captivity in Libya, but two others, who had been captured at the same time, have most likely been killed, Italian officials said on Friday.

In a statement, the Italian foreign ministry confirmed the release of Filippo Calcagno and Gino Pollicardo, technicians with Bonatti, an Italian contractor that does engineering and construction work for the oil and gas industries.

They were among four Italians captured in July near an oil and gas plant outside Sabratha, about 80km west of Tripoli. The IS has become a domineering presence in Sabratha in recent months. A video that circulated on social media showed the two freed Italians looking exhausted but relieved.

But their joy was tempered by accounts that the bodies of their fellow captives had been discovered at the site of a gunfight between IS fighters and a local militia in Sabratha on Wednesday.

Although not officially confirmed through DNA tests, Italian officials said privately that they had identified the bodies as those of Fausto Piani and Salvatore Failla, the other two hostages.

The mayor of Sabratha told Italian news agencies that the two were among 12 bodies retrieved from the scene of the battle at a house outside the town. The hostages could have died in crossfire or been killed by their captors, he said.

The mixed fortunes of the four hostages highlighted both the danger faced by foreigners working in Libya’s diminished energy sector and the volatility of the situation in Sabratha, which has become a prominent focus of western and Libyan efforts to stop the IS’ aggressive expansion across the country.

There have been repeated clashes in the town since US warplanes bombed an IS training camp there last month, killing at least 43 people, including, most likely, a senior commander linked to two major assaults on foreign tourists in Tunisia last year.

That attack also killed two Serbian hostages, drawing an angry rebuke from Belgrade, which said it had been negotiating their release. The dead hostages, who worked at the Serbian embassy in Tripoli, had been abducted from a convoy as they passed through Sabratha in November.

Although Sabratha is far from the IS’ main stronghold around Sirte, about 435km along the coast to the southeast, the extremists have tried to assert their authority there in recent weeks by clashing violently with other militia groups and, at one point, beheading rival fighters and blocking a road with their decapitated bodies.

Kidnapping for ransom has become a major problem as the country splintered into chaos since the ouster of its longtime dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, in 2011.