ZURICH: Two Swiss businessmen prevented from leaving Libya for more than a year have been handed back to the Swiss embassy in Tripoli, the Swiss Foreign Ministry said yesterday.

The ministry said in a statement the Libyan authorities had given no explanation for handing over the two men, who it said were as well as could be expected in the circumstances.

The ministry did not say whether the pair could now leave Libya and no one was immediately available to give more details.

“The two kidnapped Swiss citizens were returned to the Swiss embassy in Tripoli by the Libyan authorities without any explanation,” the statement said.

In a dispute that has soured relations between the two countries, the two men have been prevented from leaving Libya since July 2008, days after Swiss police arrested Muammar Gaddafi’s son Hannibal and his wife in Geneva on charges of mistreating two domestic employees. The charges were later dropped.

The Swiss government had expected Libya to allow the two men to leave after President Hans-Rudolf Merz apologised in August for the arrest of Hannibal Gaddafi, but the men were then held at an undisclosed location.

The two men are Max Goeldi, head of the Swiss-Swedish electrical engineering conglomerate in Tripoli, and a 68-year-old businessman working for a construction company, identified by Swiss media as Rachid Hamdani.

Turkey’s swine flu toll hits 30

ankara: The death toll from swine flu climbed to 30 in Turkey yesterday as the health ministry said the disease claimed three more lives. A three-year-old girl, a nine-year-old boy and a 40-year-old man were the latest victims of the A(H1N1) virus, the ministry said in a brief statement.

Swine flu deaths in Turkey have risen steadily since the first fatality was reported on October 24. On November 2 hospitals began vaccinating medical workers and people planning to travel to Makkah for the Haj - the first move in a campaign to vaccinate 28 million of the country’s population of 71 million.