“Missing NYT reporters found and to be released on Friday,” Times spokesman Robert Christie said in a message on his Twitter feed.
The New York Times reported the disappearance of the four on Wednesday. They went missing around the port city of Ajdabiya during fighting between rebels and Moamer Kadhafi’s forces.
In an interview Friday with ABC News, one of Kadhafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam Kadhafi, said one of the missing New York Times journalists had been arrested and would be released.
But the newspaper said Libyan government officials told the State Department on Thursday that all four were in custody and would be released.
The Times said the missing journalists included Beirut bureau chief Anthony Shadid, a two-time winner for foreign reporting of the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious US journalism award.
The others are Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009 and rescued by British commandos, and two photographers, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who both have extensive experience working in the Middle East and Africa.
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