Senior British officer meets leader of kidnappers

A senior British army officer has held direct talks with a leader of the West Side Boys militia who on Friday abducted 11 British and one Sierra Leonean soldier, the BBC reported on Tuesday. It quoted a spokesman for the British military training mission in Sierra Leone as saying that Colonel Simon Fordham of the Royal Irish Regiment had met ‘Colonel’ Kallay, a leader of the West Side Boys. Eight of the 11 British troops were from Northern Ireland, two from the Republic of Ireland and one from Merseyside, in northwest Britain, the BBC said. They are part of over 200 British troops from the 1st Battalion of the Irish Regiment which is training and advising the Sierra Leonean army. Sierra Leonean Information Minister Julius Spencer told IRIN on Tuesday that the captors had not yet made any demands to the government and that the talks to free the soldiers were continuing. The United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL, is helping the Sierra Leonean and British governments in their effort to secure their release. UNAMSIL says the detainees were being well treated and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Monday he expected them to be freed “in the near future”. However, he added: “I think the rebels have to be careful not to go around believing that it is easy to take peacekeepers as hostages because they do have robust rules of engagement and they are going to be defending themselves.”