July 15 (Bloomberg) -- Two French security advisers abducted in Somalia yesterday are being held by Islamist rebels and a rival group has asked for them to be handed over for execution, a police official said.

The unidentified men were abducted yesterday in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, while they were eating breakfast at the Sahafi Hotel. A militia that carried out the abductions handed them over to Hisb-ul-Islam, said Muhideen Ahmed, an official with the Mogadishu police, in an interview today from the city.

“Those who kidnapped the French security advisers handed them over to Hisb-ul-Islam,” Ahmed said. “Al-Shabaab asked Hisb- ul-Islam to handover the hostages” in order to kill them.

Somalia is in its 18th year of civil war. Islamist fighters opposed to the government of President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed are grouped mainly under the al-Shabaab militia and the Hizb-ul-Islam movement. The U.S. accuses al-Shabaab of having ties with al-Qaeda. Hizb-ul-Islam is led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the former head of the Islamic Courts Union that captured most of southern Somalia in 2006 before being ousted by U.S.- backed Ethiopian troops the following year.

Sheikh Abdulkadir Ali Omar, Somalia’s interior minister, today condemned the abduction of the French men and described as “baseless” allegations that his department was involved in the abduction.

Agence France-Presse reported that an unidentified official from Somalia’s National Security Agency claimed the French men were abducted by Interior Ministry forces, suggesting dissidence with the government’s security apparatus.

‘Hiding the Truth’

“That is an absolutely groundless false alarm that the criminals are using to hide the truth,” he said. “We have been investigating the case and we have already got more information about the masterminds, their names and how the abduction occurred. We will bring all involved to justice.”

In an e-mailed statement today, the French Foreign Ministry declined to respond when asked if the two men may now be detained by Islamists.

The ministry reiterated that “the two advisers where on an official support mission for the Somali government.”

“Being on an official mission, their status was also official and was not that of journalists,” it said. “We have no elements confirming the initial and local assessment that they would have registered under another status than theirs.”

Mohamed Hassan Gafaa, the manager of the hotel where the abductions took place, said yesterday the men had registered as journalists when they arrived in the country on July 9.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that promotes press freedom around the world, criticized the men’s use of journalism endangered reporters in an area where media personnel are already in danger.

“Being a journalist is not a cover, it is a profession,” it said. “We hope these two advisers are freed quickly but we are shocked that they were passing themselves off as journalists.”

At least six reporters have been killed in Somalia this year, four of them “apparently victims of targeted assassinations,” Navi Pillay, the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, said last week.

To contact the reporter on this story: Hamsa Omar in Mogadishu via Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 15, 2009 10:48 EDT