DOZENS OF JOURNALISTS and photographers have been released from a Tripoli hotel after being held there for five days by pro-Gaddafi gunmen.

AP reports that the 35-or-so journalists and photographers were released earlier, and were taken by the Red Cross to other hotels in the city where they were received by friends and colleagues.

The Red Cross had been discussing the release of the journalists when word came through that the Gaddafi loyalists were ready to release them.

“We were able to gather everyone in four cars, no problem,” George Comninos, the head of the Red Cross delegation in Tripoli, told AP. “Of course, it was still a tense situation.”

Former US Congressman Walter Fontroy is also among the 35 foreign nationals who are unable to leave the hotel.

AP photographer Dario Lopez-Mills said yesterday that the group has been trapped by “government enforcers” who brought journalists outside when Gaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam showed up at the hotel.

Al-Islam showed up at the hotel early on Tuesday morning after rebels claimed they had captured him.

Lopez-Mills says that the gunmen brought the group back to the hotel after al-Islam’s visit:

Back to the $400-a-night prison, with a spa but no power or air conditioning, with candlelight but no romance. With the sound of machine gunfire outside and bullets whistling past the windows, smoke hovering over the Libyan capital.We might have been in the middle of much of Tripoli’s fighting, but we saw little of it close up. Other than that short interlude, we have been here for days, surrounded by the combat.

The hotel had been so cut off that those inside could not tell for sure, at times, who was in control outside.

Food and drink supplies in the building were running low, to the point where one CNN journalist tweeted that gunmen had distributed Mars bars for breakfast.

BBC reporter Matthew Price told BBC Radio 4 earlier today that the situation worsened significantly overnight when “it became clear that we were unable to leave the hotel of our own free will” and that gunmen “were roaming around the corridors”.

Price said that an ITN cameraman was threatened when he attempted to walk out of the hotel.

Fighting between rebels and Gaddafi supporters is still being reported in the area around the hotel. Although rebels have taken control of large parts of Tripoli, including Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aiziya compound, Gaddafi loyalists continue to hold out in other areas.