ETHIOPIA:Two 4x4s are parked at right angles to each other. The Land Rover has had its door ripped open by a grenade, while the other vehicle's windscreen has been peppered by bullets.
On the far side of the dusty village, children play around a burnt-out Toyota pick-up.
This was the scene that greeted three British embassy officials as they arrived in the remote Danakil desert in search of five missing Britons.
An empty sunglasses case, an abandoned mobile phone on the dashboard and British diplomatic licence plates were the only clues left by the kidnappers during the early-morning raid last Thursday.
Witnesses said about 30 armed men were involved in the attack - some riding camels.
"I was fast asleep in the hut over there," said a young goat herd, pulling his hand through a mop of thick, black hair.
"But all the noise and shouting woke me up. I came out to see what was happening, and saw the faranji [ foreigners] being taken away on foot by men in uniforms.
"After they were taken away, they threw a grenade at the car to make sure no one could follow."
Hamedelah stands in the heart of the Danakil Depression and is one of the most brutal environments on the planet. Yesterday, temperatures touched 40 degrees as a hairdryer wind swept volcanic dust across open expanses of desert.
The few hardy tourists who make it here are rewarded with stunning views of ravines, salt deposits and lava lakes, formed by the convergence of three tectonic plates.
The people who live here have to be tough. Little grows in the grey gravel that passes for soil. The villages are built from nothing more than sticks and stones. Even camels are scarce.
The men - dressed in loose shirts and sarongs - carry rifles to protect against the ever-present threat of tribal bandits.
British officials from the embassy in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa yesterday completed the bone-jarring journey along dried-up river beds and rutted gravel tracks to Hamedelah, about 800km (500 miles) from the capital.
It had taken them more than a day to travel from the nearest airport at Mekele after being held up by local police awaiting the correct clearance.
Other teams are believed to be scouring Ethiopia's arid north in search of the three men and two women, who were all connected to the British embassy.
The team in Hamedelah examined two of the vehicles and interviewed Ali Mohamed, one of 13 Ethiopians snatched from the village along with the Britons.
He said he was woken by a noise at about 3am on Thursday morning. Rough hands grabbed him as he emerged from his hut and he was beaten. They then forced him to walk for two hours towards the Eritrean border.
He said most of the men - about 30 armed with AK-47 rifles - wore Eritrean uniforms.
"When we were a certain distance, they brought the British people," the 20-year-old salt miner said in the local Afar dialect. "It was dark when they arrived, so it was difficult to see their expressions or how they were being treated."
He was later set free along with five other Ethiopians.
Mystery still surrounds who took the Britons and why. Some residents of Hamedelah insisted the attackers wore the fatigues of Ethiopian police, and most believed they were bandits who have harassed tourists in the past.
Many questions remain. Why did the local militias not give chase or try to prevent the kidnapping? And why has no one contacted the British or Ethiopian governments with demands?
All that is certain is that the Britons were taken in the direction of the Eritrean border, some three hours' hard march away.
For now, British officials prefer to assume nothing. "If, as has been speculated, the group is being held against their will, it may be they have been victims of mistaken identity," Bob Dewar, the British ambassador to Ethiopia, said in a statement.
He added that teams in London and Ethiopia were doing everything possible to find out what had happened.