Kidnapped Italian journalists arrive in Malta [SLIDESHOW]

All photos by Ray Attard/Mediatoday

Four journalists and three private contractors arrived aboard a Maltese-government chartered boat that evacuated a total of 45 EU and non-EU nationals from the Libyan capital.

Visibly shocked from their ordeal, the three contractors spent a month in the notorious Abu Salim prison at the hands of the Gaddafi forces before being released Thuesday by rebels as they entered the city.

The four Italian journalists were taken hostage by Muammar Gaddafi loyalists. Their two-day ordeal suffered by the journalists — Domenico Quirico, Elisabetta Rosaspina and Giuseppe Sarcina from Milan daily Corriere della Sera, and Claudio Monici, from Avvenire, the daily of the Italian Catholic Bishops Conference — began when the kidnappers shot and killed their driver and ended when a rival group of loyalists freed them in a raid on the house where they were being held, the reporters said.

Giuseppe Sarcina, a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, told Sky News 24 they were captured by loyalists at gunpoint on Wednesday near Green Square in the Libyan capital.

 “They took the driver and made him get out of the car,” Claudio Monici of Avvenire of the daily newspaper of the Italian bishops conference told Sky News. “He understood that that was the end, and they beat him and killed him in front of our eyes. They were angry, with bloodshot eyes.”

Monici said the gunmen that took them hostage asked if they were from Italy, then accused them of participating in the NATO bombing campaign aimed at ousting Gaddafi. Monici said some of the journalists were kicked and beaten during the ordeal.

During their 24-hour captivity, the journalists said they were held in a garage, then moved around Tripoli in a car supposedly to a military headquarters to be interrogated. They were later freed by the rival loyalists from a private residence.