Two Belgian tourists have gone missing in Iran after travelling on a road in the south-east of the country notorious for attacks by bandits and drug traffickers, officials said on Monday. "Officials are now carrying out actions to recover the two tourists," Majid Etemadi, the governor of the town of Bam, told the state-run IRNA news agency.
IRNA said the tourists disappeared on Saturday around the town of Fahraj, situated on the road between Bam and Zahedan, the capital of the restive Sistan-Baluchestan province which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The road, which leads to the Pakistan border, is considered highly dangerous because of the presence of armed bandits and drug traffickers. The area has been the scene of around a dozen abductions of foreigners over the past decade. Etemadi said the pair were a married couple, aged 27 and 30, and were travelling in the region in a private car.
The Belgian foreign ministry said its embassy in Tehran was seeking to verify the report. "Our embassy is trying to make contact with the Bam prefecture, to verify the identity and nationality (of the missing couple)," a ministry spokesman told AFP.
Despite stringent warnings by their foreign ministries to avoid the area, foreign tourists are still known to use the road to cross from Iran into Pakistan, often using their own transport rather than bus services.
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