BERN - The end of the ordeal came quietly, and it came via Libya. The Libyan television channel Al-Masar announced during the night from Wednesday to Thursday that two European hostages, a Swiss woman and an Austrian woman, had been released after a year and a half in captivity in Niger and had arrived in Benghazi. In a video broadcast by the channel, the two women appeared tired but composed, seated beneath a portrait of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar. Speaking in French, Claudia Abbt thanked her rescuers: she had been taken hostage a year and six months ago, she said, and was now happy to be free.
Abbt was seized in April 2025 in Agadez, the historic caravan city in northern Niger, and was held by the Islamic State Sahel group. Eva Gretzmacher, an Austrian aid worker, had been in captivity even longer, one year and nine months. Libyan officials said the women would be handed over to the authorities of their home countries once the necessary procedures were completed. Saddam Haftar, the deputy commander-in-chief of Libya's armed forces and a son of the field marshal, claimed a central role in bringing about the release.
Bern never closed the door
The release is being read in Bern as vindication of a deliberately unglamorous strategy. After the coup of July 2023, Switzerland kept its diplomatic channels to Niamey open, even as France sharply reduced its cooperation with the military authorities. In May, Ambassador Philipp Stalder, head of the foreign ministry's sub-Saharan Africa and Francophonie division, was received in Niamey by Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, one of the most senior figures in the military government. Cassis himself met Nigerien representatives in September, on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York.
The effort went beyond polite contact. Swiss federal police agents travelled to Niger on at least one occasion to advance the negotiations, according to reporting by RTS. The foreign ministry had said almost nothing in public about the case for months, a silence officials privately described as essential to keeping the captors' price in talking rather than in spectacle. On Thursday morning that silence broke within minutes of the Libyan announcement, and by midday the confirmation was official.
A region where kidnapping has become a tactic
Niger is battling a jihadist insurgency linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State that grew out of the Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali in 2012. The fighting has killed many thousands and displaced millions across the central Sahel over the past decade, and kidnappings for ransom or leverage have intensified markedly over the last year. Agadez, once a fixture on adventurous overland itineraries, has been effectively closed to Western travellers for years, and the Swiss travel advice for Niger has long warned against all travel to the country.
What happens now
For Abbt, the coming days will mean medical checks, a structured debriefing and, above all, privacy. The foreign ministry asks that the family's wish for quiet be respected, and says nothing about the terms of the release, as is standard in Berne. For the foreign ministry, the case closes one of the longest hostage ordeals involving a Swiss national in recent years, and it will strengthen the argument, heard often in Bern, that keeping channels open to pariah governments is not naivety but a working tool. The same doctrine shapes Swiss policy from its neighbour's restless streets to the Sahel.