French commandos have rescued four western hostages who had been seized by a militant group in Burkina Faso, in a “complex” operation in which two French special forces soldiers were killed, authorities in Paris said.

The elite troops freed two French tourists – Patrick Picque and Laurent Lassimouillas, who disappeared on 1 May while on holiday in the remote Pendjari national park in neighbouring Benin.

France’s armed forces minister, Florence Parly, said four kidnappers were killed in the overnight military raid in which the troops also rescued a woman from America and and a South Korean woman , who they did not know were also being held and appeared to have been seized 28 days ago.

The raid was carried out under cover of darkness by special forces from France’s Barkhane operation, with what Parly described a “precious support” by US intelligence. French troops have been deployed across the Sahel region, with 4,500 soldiers sent to Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad as part of a mission against jihadist groups.

The dead soldiers were named as Cédric de Pierrepont and Alain Bertoncello, part of the Taskforce Sabre unit based in Burkina Faso.

A total of 24 French soldiers from the Barkhane force have died in the region since 2013 when France intervened in Mali to drive back jihadist groups which had taken control of the north of the country and the towns of Timbuktu and Gao.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, expressed condolences for the two French soldiers killed and thanked French special forces and those who worked alongside them to free the hostages.

Macron has repeatedly called on France’s allies to help fund and train a new regional African military force called the G5 Sahel, which experts continue to see as under-equipped and still heavily dependent on French firepower.

The location of the raid indicated that the French tourists had been kidnapped in Benin and taken over the border into Burkina Faso, where Islamist terrorist and other militant groups have stepped up attacks in recent months.

US special forces and drones are also thought to operate in the violence-hit Sahel region, which France fears could become further destabilised as jihadist groups are pushed out of north Africa, Iraq and Syria.

Burkina Faso has suffered from increasingly frequent and deadly attacks attributed to a number of jihadist groups, including Ansarul Islam, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.

The French tourists went missing with a wildlife guide on the last leg of their holiday in usually peaceful Benin on a visit to the Pendjari national park, which is known for its elephants and lions, lies close to the porous border with Burkina Faso.

The badly disfigured body of the French tourists’ guide Fiacre Gbedji was found shortly after they disappeared, as well as their abandoned 4x4 Toyota truck.

The freed men, a music teacher and a shopkeeper working in the Paris region, are expected to travel back to France this weekend.

“We’ll travel up to Paris to welcome them off the plane,” Picque’s father Jean-Claude, told AFP. “They [the authorities] told us that hostage-takings can be very long, but in the end it worked out OK, but not for the soldiers.”