It's all all right now Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

They were running short of food but still had plenty of drinking water.

The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, on hearing the news, said: "It's all all right now and life to me looks totally different personally from what it did two days ago. It puts your other personal worries into perspective."

Family reunion

Mark was reunited with his father, Denis, in the southern Algerian town of Tamanrasset.

He told reporters he'd been more worried about his family than himself: "If you're in London and somebody else is in the middle of the Sahara, one tends to conjure up slightly more imaginative pictures of what is going on than what actually happened."

Denis Thatcher said he had been very impressed with the way the search had been handled: "I found an enormously efficient organisation under the command of a remarkable soldier who quite clearly knew what he was about.

"At least for the first four to six hours I was there, he was concerned with raising my morale and confidence. He said straight away we are going to find him." .

Mark and his father are being flown back to the UK in the Algerian presidential plane.

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