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People of Sudan KHARTOUM - Darfur's longest held foreign hostage said on Saturday he felt despair during his 147-day captivity in Sudan's arid west and that his captors seemed to be organised criminals

But Gauthier Lefevre, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he was not mistreated and towards the end of his ordeal his captors left him unguarded at night.

"Very quickly I felt that they didn't intend to mistreat me and they didn't intend to hurt me so that was also quite reassuring," he said, speaking to journalists in Khartoum after his release.

"They seemed to be organised in terms of supply and in terms of the places they kept me so I would say that it was an organised group working in quite an organised way."

The dual French-British national was the last foreign hostage held in Darfur, after a spate of kidnappings of aid workers by armed young men mostly demanding ransoms.

"(I felt) despairing all the time," he said. "You had the feeling during the day that time had stopped."

Abductions of foreigners in Darfur began after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant last year for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes.

Mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing central government of neglect. Khartoum responded with a brutal counter-insurgency campaign which sparked one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

The United Nations estimates some 300,000 died and more than 2 million were driven from their homes in Darfur, with around 4 million dependent on aid.

The ICRC suspended operations in the area following the kidnap of Lefevre and another worker in nearby eastern Chad.

Lefevre said his captors moved him every two weeks to a month and he was kept either in mountain camps or isolated in vast expanses of savannah surrounded only by shepherd boys.

His guards were mostly armed and one said he had also been hired to guard two female aid workers working for GOAL, one Irish and one Ugandan, who were released just days before Lefevre's capture after more than 100 days in captivity.

He was allowed to go for walks and his guards gave him a book to read about a French explorer.

He said his rescue was sudden and unexpected. His captors had begun to leave him alone at night and would leave him and go to sleep in a hut 30 minutes walk away.

"In the evening these two (Sudanese security) agents turned up and they said let's go," Lefevre said. "We walked for about three hours, a car was waiting for us and we drove through the night and got to the helicopter."

Sudan's security said they had stolen Lefevre away from his captors after monitoring them. They said they had one man in custody.