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Five Czech citizens who went missing in Lebanon in July are now with the Lebanese security services, a security source told Reuters on Monday.

The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the five, who went missing in eastern Lebanon last year, were found late on Monday.

"We will send a plane for them as soon as possible," the Czech foreign minister, Lubomir Zaoralek, on a visit to Oman, said on his Twitter account.

The disappearance, which Czech authorities treated as a possible kidnapping, may have been related to organized crime and the drugs and arms trade, Lebanon’s interior minister said in July.

One of the missing Czechs was an attorney to Ali Fayad, a man of Lebanese origin who was in custody in the Czech Republic awaiting a decision on a U.S. extradition request.

The United States has accused Fayad of trying to sell arms and drugs to the Colombian guerrilla group FARC.

His Czech lawyer has traveled to Lebanon several times in relation to the case, according to his office.

The abandoned vehicle of the five Czech nationals and one Lebanese man who went missing was found near Kefraya, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, in July. This incident was near to where seven Estonian cyclists were kidnapped in 2011 and held for four months.

Neither the security source nor the Czech ministry said if the Lebanese driver had also been found.

(Reporting by Jan Lopatka; and Lisa Barrington; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Five Czech nationals who went missing in Lebanon in July have been found and are now in the care of Lebanon’s security force, Czech officials say.

In a statement (in Czech), the foreign ministry says they are in "satisfactory health", and a special aircraft will be sent shortly to bring them home.

The ministry did not not say whether a Lebanese driver – who was with the group – was also found.

The Czechs disappeared in the eastern Bekaa Valley last year.

Their empty car with documents and money was found in the Kefraya region.

A security operation was launched immediately amid fears the group was kidnapped.

Media reports at the time suggested that their disappearance may have been linked to the case of a Lebanese man held in the Czech Republic in connection with suspected arms smuggling.

In 2011, seven Estonian cyclists were abducted at gunpoint in the Bekaa Valley and released four months later.

Some areas of the Bekaa Valley, east of the capital Beirut, are notorious for lawlessness and drug trafficking.