Hostage crisis: Amid final assault Algerian militants kill seven foreigners

11 militants from ‘Signatories in Blood’ group also killed by special forces.

IN AMENAS:

The Algerian hostage crisis ended on Saturday with 11 gunmen killing seven foreign hostages before being gunned down by special forces in a final assault on the remote desert gas complex of In Amenas, state television said.

The 11 heavily armed men from a group known as ‘Signatories in Blood’ had been holed up at the In Amenas complex since they took hundreds of workers hostage in a dawn attack on Wednesday.

Most of the hostages, including about 100 foreigners, had been freed after the Algerian forces launched a bloody rescue operation on Thursday, which was widely condemned as hasty, but some 30 remained unaccounted for.

In Saturday’s final assault, “The Algerian Army took out 11 terrorists, and the terrorist group killed seven foreign hostages,” state TV said. It did not mention the nationalities of those who died. A security official who spoke to AFP provided the same toll for both the captors and hostages killed, adding that it was believed “they were killed in retaliation.”

The gunmen, cited by Mauritania’s ANI news agency, had said earlier they were still holding “seven foreign hostages.”

‘Signatories in Blood’, led by Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a former senior al Qaeda commander in North Africa, were demanding an end to French intervention against militants in neighbouring Mali, ANI reported earlier. Belmokhtar also wanted to exchange American hostages for the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and Dr Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani woman jailed in the US on charges of terrorist links.

On Friday, they had given a breakdown of three Belgians, two Americans, one Japanese and a Briton still captive.

An Algerian security official had put the remaining number of foreign hostages at 10.

After the assault, a security official said 25-27 foreign and Algerian hostages had been killed over the four-day crisis, but the exact number of those seized and still unaccounted for was unclear.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2013.