TERRORIST KIDNAPPINGS INCL AMERS AND KILLINGS IN ALGERIA

The remote In Amenas natural gas field in Algeria, the site of a terrorist attack and the taking of hostages on Wednesday

Algeria’s state-run news agency said on Friday that the country’s special forces were seeking to avoid further bloodshed with armed kidnappers still holding hostages at a remote gas field facility.Hostages who escaped or were freed described gunshots ringing out during breakfast, followed by foreigners being separated from Algerians. The nation’s military launched an intense assault that freed captives, killed kidnappers but also left some hostages dead.

At least 60 foreign hostages are still unaccounted for in the standoff with Islamic militants in Algeria, the country’s state news agency said Friday. Half the 132 foreign nationals have been freed, along with 573 Algerians, says Reuters. According to a Mauritanian news agency, the kidnappers offered to trade two American hostages for two jailed terrorists, including Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Some of the hostages were reportedly strapped to explosives, according to Garry Barlow, one of the freed hostages. British Prime Minister David Cameron said the British government had not been told by Algeria about the rescue mission beforehand.

Read it at Associated Press

January 18, 2013 10:03 AM

 

The drama began at about 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday with an attack on a bus carrying workers to the nearby airport that was thwarted by Algerian security escorts. It turned into a major hostage-taking as well-armed and experienced Islamists took over the facility’s residential area, which is situated at a distance from the plant to protect workers should an explosion occur.

 

Fred Dufour/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Soldiers from Togo arriving in Mali on Thursday to support French action against Islamists, amid concerns of wider turmoil.

 

Al Mulathameen, the Islamist group that has claimed responsibility for the attack, has made clear in statements to Mauritanian news outlets that foreign citizens were explicitly targeted. A separate hostage situation of sorts appeared to be evolving at a village in Mali, the neighboring country where a French military intervention to stop radical Islamists may have been the catalyst for the Algerian gas-field seizure by the Al Mulathameen group.

A senior French official in Paris said Malian Islamist fighters, threatened by French and Malian soldiers, had occupied the village, Diabaly, and were threatening to use residents as human shields if attacked

 

The Algerian military operation at the gas field began on Thursday without consultation with the foreign governments whose citizens worked at the gas field facility. It has been marked by a fog of conflicting reports, compounded by the remoteness of the facility, near a town called In Amenas hundreds of miles across the desert from the Algerian capital, Algiers, and close to the Libyan border

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta brought a bit of much-needed clarity to the chaotic hostage crisis in Algeria when he confirmed to ABC's Martha Raddatz that the attack had, in fact, been carried out by terrorists with links to al Qaeda."The White House has yet to confirm the al Qaeda link. According to state media, an estimated 573 Algerians foreigners had made it safely out of the desert plant near In Amenas.