I still reckon that an insurance payment by all bikers going on a trip that covers even/only the costs of hiring an "independent negotiator" to establishes what "the demands" really are. You hear of all the families in distress (listen to the French families) with their husbands/fathers/sons being taken, not getting clear information of any demands made ie cash, prisoner release/exchange, amnesty etc I accept that prisoner swops have to be at Government levels of negotiations but at least one would then know something concrete is happening.

I hear that at a meeting in Kuwait that it was discussed that anyone who pays a ransom can/should be criminally charged.

If I were taken hostage I would be pretty keen to have that insurance paying for the negotiator, if not more. Being held for even a few weeks must be a very, very difficult thing and one that is hard to imagine without the incident actually happening to you. But it is also true that having such insurance is accommodating the kidnapping process - it is ramping up the business model of the kidnappers. It will, for one, institutionalise well paid middle-men for example. It will soon become in the interests of the middle men that kidnappings occur from time to time.

Sadly the only way to ensure that you won't get kidnapped in the Sahara is not to go to the Sahara. Even then, the range of operations of the kidnappers will simply expand in response - as it did in the Indian Ocean piracy issue. There was a time when that piracy was just off the Horn of Africa and only in the transition seasons (March and October) when the monsoon winds are not strong. But then, when navies began making the piracy more difficult in the immediate Horn of Africa, it expanded to the Indian Ocean even south of the equator - e.g. Seychelles. In the case of the Sahara kidnappings, the expansion has taken the form of an arc of kidnapping extending from Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon through Niger, Algeria and Mali and on to the Atlantic coast in Mauri. That's a lot of country. My feeling is that it will take many years for the kidnapping business to recede. So long as we have the ungoverned regions like Libya and N Niger, we will have no improvement. The regime change in Libya was a naive move by NATO. It could not have been worse timing for security in North Africa as a whole.