Italy said all channels of communication were open on Thursday as the nation awaited news of a newspaper reporter being held hostage by Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan.
"We're working, we're trying to keep open all channels of communication but at the moment there is no information that we can seriously give out," said Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema on the sidelines of a meeting in Brussels.
A Pakistani journalist told ANSA meanwhile that La Repubblica correspondent Daniele Mastrogiacomo was unharmed and that the Taliban was negotiating with Italian authorities for his release.
"He's well, they haven't hurt him," said Rahimullah Yousefzai, who said he had had direct contact with the Italian's Taliban captors on Thursday morning.
Mastrogiacomo went missing Monday on a trip while attempting to interview Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan, where NATO has just unleashed the biggest offensive since the 2001 war that toppled the Islamists.
It appeared that at least initially Taliban fighters believed the reporter, an experienced war correspondent who speaks English fluently, was a British spy.
"They have't made any public requests. I think they know he isn't a spy and the fact that they are negotiating is the proof," said Yousefzai, one of the top Afghanistan experts in Pakistan.
The Italian foreign ministry made no immediate comment on the report that negotiations were already under way.
CAPTORS MUST PROVIDE PROOF.
Earlier in the day officials said Italy will only negotiate Mastrogiacomo's release of if it receives proof he is alive.
"I think we can only start talking about...negotiations when we get more precise information including proof that the hostage is alive," the head of the ministry's Crisis Unit, Elisabetta Bertoni, told a news briefing.
In a report that conflicted with that of the Pakistani journalist, German news agency DPA on Thursday cited a Taliban spokesman as saying Mastrogiacomo had confessed to being a spy and was being tried by a Taliban council.
Bertoni said the ministry was trying to establish the reliability of this and other claims.
She dismissed talk of a prisoner exchange, pointing out that Italy has no Taliban prisoners.
The reporter's wife, contacted by journalists in Rome, appealed for his release, saying he was only "a journalist who has always done his job and served his newspaper".
A demonstration calling for Mastrogiacomo's release was held in the piazza in front of Rome city hall on Thurssday morning. Hundreds of people turned out holding placards reading: "With Daniele, For His Release".
