Italians kidnapped in Somalia freed, Frattini says

Two Italian aid workers kidnapped in Somalia in May have been released, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told the House on Tuesday.
The pair, Iolanda Occhipinti and Giuliano Paganini, were abducted from the offices of their non-governmental organisation on May 21 by armed men who drove off on jeeps.
A Somali who co-managed the project, identified as Abderahman Yusuf, was also kidnapped.
Frattini said the two Italians were ''about to land at Nairobi airport'' and were in ''good health''.
He voiced ''the government's immense and profound satisfaction for this outcome, the result of months of efforts'' but declined to provide futher details, saying ''we'll wait to hear from the (former) hostages''.
The news of the release had been leaked earlier on Tuesday by Occhipinti's son, who said he had received a phone call from his mother.
''She called me on her cellphone this afternoon and told me she was okay. She didn't say anything about Paganini but the phone link was bad, with a lot of interference,'' Gianni Tumino told reporters in Sicily.
Italian foreign ministry sources had not confirmed the report, saying only that negotiations for their release were ''in a crucial and hopefully conclusive phase''.
''Everyone is working for a positive solution,'' the sources said, just minutes before Frattini's announcement.
Occhipinti, 55, is a health administrator and Paganini, 64, an agronomist on an irrigation project run by an NGO called CINS (North-South Italian Cooperation) at Aw Dheegle, a drought-hit zone 70km south of the Somali capital Mogadishu.
Occhipinti is from the Sicilian city of Ragusa and Paganini from the Tuscan town of Pistoia, where he has a wife and daughter.