BERN. Swiss public broadcaster RTS reported on Tuesday that cash and weapons were handed over before a Swiss woman and an Austrian woman were freed in the Sahel. The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs says Switzerland paid no ransom and provided nothing else in exchange, and that it has no evidence a third party paid a ransom either.
Claudia Abbt, 69, a Swiss citizen, and Eva Gretzmacher, 76, an Austrian, were abducted in Agadez, Niger, in 2025 and held for nearly two years. Libyan officials said in October that the two women had reached Benghazi. RTS, in a report published on Tuesday afternoon, said Saddam Haftar, the commander who dominates eastern Libya, played a central part in the release through networks in the region. His office and his military staff did not answer the broadcaster’s questions.
What a rebel leader told RTS
RTS said it had spoken to Mohamed Wardougou, leader of a southern Libyan group opposed to Haftar. Wardougou said his fighters had detained five Malian men he linked to the kidnapping and to the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. He placed the arrest in the Salvador Pass, where the borders of Niger, Libya and Algeria meet, and said the men were returning from a base in south-western Libya where, he said, Haftar’s people had handed over money and military equipment.
The published account includes a claim of drones and other arms, and a claim that each courier was paid about CHF 14,000 to move the hostages, with two similar handovers said to have happened earlier. RTS said it could not establish whether a ransom was among those consignments. A source close to the talks told the broadcaster that Haftar had put up $2.5 million of his own money, a sum a local source described as lower than usual because Gretzmacher’s health put the exchange at risk. The people named in that account did not confirm the figure.
A second figure, and Bern’s denial
A different number is also in circulation, and it should be kept separate. Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told RTS that ransoms were paid, that the releases were not achieved by force, and that there were serious indications the money came from the United Arab Emirates. He cited a separate earlier case. That is his reading of sources. It is not a finding by a Swiss authority.
The foreign ministry’s statement is the part that can be attributed to the Swiss state. It said that Switzerland, as a matter of practice and in this case, neither paid a ransom nor provided any other consideration for the release of the Swiss hostage. It added that it has no evidence a ransom was paid by third parties, or that any other transaction took place. Those sentences do not prove that nobody else paid. They record what Bern says it did, and what Bern says it knows.
What is known, and what is still a claim
Nicolas Normand, a former French ambassador to Mali, told RTS that a ransom is paid in the great majority of kidnappings of this kind, and that the money encourages further abductions and buys weapons and wages. Wardougou gave a similar warning about equipment reaching armed groups. Whether that is what happened here is the dispute, not a settled fact. Haftar received the two women at his offices in Benghazi after their release, and he has been involved in other hostage cases in the region this year. Researchers who follow him argue that the publicity is part of the point: a claim to be the intermediary who can get people out.
For readers in Switzerland the narrow facts are these. Two women are free after nearly two years in captivity. The government that speaks for one of them says it paid nothing and has no evidence of a payment by anyone else. On Tuesday a public broadcaster published named claims that money and arms moved anyway, and those claims do not match each other. Until a record appears that the ministry says it does not have, the story is that argument: a denial on the record, and accounts that contradict it, each of them attributed to someone who was not in the room when Bern issued its sentence.