Hiiraan Online

The Foreign Office in London confirmed the release, saying the "priority now is to get her to a place of safety."

Tebbutt, 57, was taken on September 11 last year from a remote beach resort near the Kenyan-Somali border by armed men who shot dead her husband David.

"The British lady who was kidnapped from Kenya was just released," said Mahmoud Hirsi, an elder in the Addado region.

"She is a free woman, but I cannot discuss the technical details of her release," he added.

Abdiwali Ahmed, a resident of Addado, said Tebbutt had left Somalia on a small airplane bound for the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

"The plane had the hostage and three other people on board," he said.

She was released in the Addado region, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the Ethiopian border and about 500 kilometres (300 miles) northeast of Somalia's capital Mogadishu.

Tebbutt, reported to have hearing difficulties, is believed to have been held by gunmen in a lawless region notorious for its pirate gangs who had held Paul and Rachel Chandler, the British couple seized from their yacht in 2009 and held for a year.

"The people in Addado and the surrounding areas pushed the local leaders to do something about the hostage. I heard that since the abduction, she was held by three different groups," said Abdullahi Yasin, a driver in Addado.

Security was beefed up in the region after US special forces swooped in by helicopter on a night raid in January to rescue an American woman and a Danish man working for a demining aid agency in the area.

Pirates in the region also hold hundreds of hostages seized from ships in the Indian Ocean, and have in the past demanded multi-million dollar ransoms for the release of captives and of boats.

It was not immediately clear if a ransom had been paid to secure Tebbutt's release, but local elder Mohamud Ibrahim said negotiations had been ongoing since her capture, and that "expenses incurred during the captivity were very high."

"Community elders and civil society groups have been active in order to resolve the matter," Ibrahim said.

"The people in Addado were sympathetic to the hostage because she lost her husband and suffered too much at the hands of her abductors," Mohamud Ibrahim, another resident and elder.

The couple, from the town of Bishop's Stortford in southeastern England, were attacked in their room at night. They were the only guests at the upmarket Kiwayu Safari Village, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the Somali border.

A French woman, Marie Dedieu, kidnapped from the same coastal area three weeks later, died in captivity.

In October, gunmen captured two Spanish aid workers from Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, who are believed to be still held in Somalia.

The spate of attacks prompted Kenya to send in troops and tanks into southern Somalia in October to attack the Al-Qaeda allied Shebab insurgents, who Nairobi blamed for the attacks.

The extremist insurgents, who control large parts of southern and central Somalia, have always denied involvement in the kidnappings, but do admit to abducting Kenyan officials they call prisoners of war.