The members of the International Committee of the Red Cross team "are alive and in good health" in the hands of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, a MUJAO official told AFP in a telephone call.
MUJAO is one of the groups allied to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which occupied the north of Mali in 2012 before they were partly driven from the region by a French-led military intervention in January last year.
He gave no other details.
ICRC spokesman Alexis Heeb told AFP yesterday that four ICRC staff members and a veterinarian from another aid organisation went missing on Saturday along with their vehicle on the road between the towns of Kidal and Gao.
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All five individuals are Malian citizens.
"At this stage we're exploring all possibilities. We're extremely worried and we're contacting everyone to try to localise them," Heeb said at the time.
For security reasons, ICRC teams make regular contact every few hours with their base when they are on mission, and the team had done so for part of its journey.
ICRC operations in Mali range from visiting people detained during the country's conflict to providing aid to the hundreds of thousands of people who were driven from their homes by fighting.
Mali descended into chaos when Tuareg rebels and Islamist groups took over the north after a military coup in March 2012 far to the south in the capital Bamako.
The rebels started an advance on Bamako that led to a military intervention by former colonial power France in January 2013.
French troops pushed the Al-Qaeda-linked militants out of northern towns early last year and have kept up operations against residual groups of insurgents.
France is winding down its force from a peak of around 5,000 soldiers but is to keep 1,000 troops in Mali beyond the spring.