Austrian national Eva Gretzmacher and Swiss national Claudia Abbt arrived in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi this month after being freed from roughly 20 months of captivity in Niger, Libyan media outlets reported Thursday, with forces loyal to military commander Khalifa Haftar credited with securing their release.
Gretzmacher, 76, was abducted from her home in the Niger town of Agadez on January 11, 2025, after nearly three decades living in the country and running community projects in education, health and women’s livelihoods. Abbt, 69, a longtime Agadez resident married to a Nigerien national, was seized from her own home in the city three months later, on April 13, 2025. Security officials have linked both abductions to the Islamic State’s Sahel affiliate, which is believed to have relied on local subcontractors to carry out the kidnappings before transferring the women toward Mali and holding them in the group’s custody.
In a video released by Libya’s eastern-based al-Masar TV, the women appeared thin from their time in captivity and thanked Haftar and his son, Saddam, deputy commander-in-chief of Libya’s eastern-aligned armed forces, who Libyan officials say personally oversaw the operation that led to their release. “I had been held hostage for a year and nine months,” Gretzmacher said in French, identifying herself by name and age in the footage. Abbt said separately that she was happy to be free, and also thanked Haftar.
Read Also: Niger Troops Clash With Presidential Guard In Palace Attack
The Eastern Update has gathered that the operation capped months of deteriorating health concerns around Gretzmacher’s captivity; her family was told as early as May that her condition had become critical enough that captors lowered their ransom demand rather than risk her dying in custody. Both women are expected to be formally handed over to Austrian and Swiss authorities once repatriation procedures with Libyan officials are completed, according to officials familiar with the handover who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Thursday’s release follows a pattern of similar cases in the region this year. An American missionary abducted in Niger in October 2025 was freed in August, and Libyan intelligence services have separately claimed credit for helping secure other foreign hostages taken by armed groups operating across the porous borders of Niger, Mali and southern Libya. Niger’s military government has not issued its own statement on Gretzmacher and Abbt’s release, and it was not clear by Thursday whether Niamey played any direct role in the operation that freed them.
Agadez, where both women lived for years before their abductions, sits near Niger’s borders with Algeria and Libya and has become one of the Sahel’s most frequent kidnapping corridors as militant groups linked to both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State compete for territory and ransom revenue across the region. Niger’s military government, which seized power in a 2023 coup, has struggled to contain the growing presence of armed groups even as it has distanced itself from former Western security partners including France and the United States.
Read Also: Nigeria Evacuates 105 More Citizens Fleeing S’Africa Attacks
Libya itself remains divided between rival administrations: a United Nations-recognized government in Tripoli led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and an eastern administration backed by Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army. The country has not fully stabilized since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi, but Haftar’s forces have increasingly positioned themselves as intermediaries in hostage negotiations across the wider Sahel-Sahara region, building relationships with armed factions that Western governments have found difficult to engage directly.
Neither the Austrian nor Swiss foreign ministries had issued a formal public statement confirming the handover by the time Libyan outlets reported the women’s arrival in Benghazi. Both governments had previously acknowledged pursuing separate diplomatic channels toward securing the women’s freedom, without disclosing details of those efforts while negotiations were ongoing.
Gretzmacher and Abbt were not the only foreign nationals reported missing from Agadez in the same stretch of 2025. A French citizen identified by officials only as Gilbert was abducted from the city in a manner security sources described as similar to the two earlier cases, part of a wider spike in kidnappings that followed Niger’s 2023 coup and the subsequent withdrawal of French and American troops who had previously supported regional counterterrorism operations. Analysts tracking the Sahel say the security vacuum left by that withdrawal has allowed armed groups greater freedom to operate along smuggling routes that cross Niger, Mali and southern Libya largely unimpeded.
Haftar’s forces have used their position along those same routes to build a specialized role in hostage recovery operations, leveraging relationships with armed factions and local intermediaries that foreign governments have found difficult to access directly through formal diplomatic channels. Libyan intelligence officials claimed a comparable role in 2026 in securing the release of two other European hostages held for roughly eight months by a group linked to al-Qaeda, a case that similarly concluded with the captives being moved through Libyan territory before being handed to their home governments.
