CAIRO – A Cairo court last Thursday sentenced an Egyptian tour guide who took four German tourists hostage in a child custody battle to 15 years in prison with hard labour, court sources said. Ibrahim Ali held the Germans in the southern city of Luxor for three days in March to pressure Egypt and Germany to let him see his two sons, who had been taken to Germany by his German ex-wife. The Cairo state security court found him guilty of taking hostages and trying to influence the Egyptian authorities by means of violence, force, threats. Of four other defendants, two were sentenced to five years each for supplying Ali with weapons and two were each given a one-year sentence for providing him with ammunition. Under Egypt‘s emergency laws in place since 1981, the state security court ruling can only be appealed through a petition to President Hosni Mubarak. The kidnapping received widespread attention in Egypt, which relies on tourism as one of its main foreign currency earners, along with Suez Canal receipts, oil exports and remittances from expatriate Egyptians. Tourism has been recovering from the blow it suffered when a Muslim militant killed 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997, and the government is keen to ensure that Egypt remains a popular and safe destination. But many Egyptians sympathised with Ali and considered the kidnapping an act of frustration by a man desperate to see his children. Some said the authorities who prevented him from travelling to Germany were to blame for the hostage drama. Reuters