SANAA -- Gunmen have freed a German diplomat, held hostage for two months, officials said Monday.

Rainer Berns, 55, the commercial attache at the German Embassy, was brought to the capital Sanaa by police helicopter on Monday morning and taken home to his family after a midnight Sunday release.

A diplomat at the German Embassy told AFP he was "safe and sound".

In Berlin, Foreign Minister, Joshchka Fischer, praised the Yemeni government for its careful handling of the kidnapping.

"It is with great joy and great relief that I learnt that our colleague who was captured in Yemen was released last night," he said.

"Tribal leaders managed to get him released peacefully," one official told AFP by telephone from Maarib Province, some 170 kilometers (100 miles) east of the capital Sanaa.

Berns, who was snatched from his car in Sanaa on July 27, had been held in Serwah, 30 kilometres (18 miles) east of Maarib.

The exact circumstances of the release were unclear, as was the identity of the kidnappers who asked for a million-dollar ransom.

A tribal dignitary told AFP that the abductors were from the Al-Zaidi tribe and all supporters of the jihad, a hardline Yemeni group.

A Western diplomat last month said that Berns, who sent a message to his embassy last week saying he had been forced to walk a long distance through mountains to flee security forces, had been captured by an "Islamist terrorist group," rather than by a tribe.

The end of the kidnapping, the longest since Yemen's heavily armed tribesmen seeking money or concessions from the government or oil companies began taking hostages in the early 1990s, came as the government arrested "Arab Afghans", believed to have links to Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.