“Gigi,” as we called her, knew her way around dangerous places. I met her when I first began covering the continent 15 years ago, when she was already considered a seasoned Africa hand. We had both covered the Congo war. We would talk frequently and exchange information when we could. She had just started to cover the fighting in Mali. Claude, whom I also knew for many years and worked with from time to time, was more than a technician. He, too, loved Africa and journalism, interjecting interviews with insightful questions.

Their loss is painful for me and my colleagues, even more so because it is so senseless. Some security sources speculate that the abductors killed them so that they could quickly flee, after the pickup truck broke down only 12 kilometers from Kidal.

These ghastly killings are disturbing on several other levels — some complex, some depressingly simple, some deliberately ambiguous. For one, they show that none of the forces stationed in Kidal could prevent four men from abducting two foreigners in broad daylight. For another, they indicate that anything relating to France, the “small Satan” in Al Qaeda’s eyes, might be a target. As a source in the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, or M.N.L.A., told me: “Kidal is completely out of control.”

I reached Kidal last February, at the height of the French military’s campaign to check the southern advance of AQIM and its allies: Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith) and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, known as Mujao. Over several weeks, French and Malian soldiers took back control of the main cities of the north: Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. More importantly, they managed to clean out the rebel stronghold in the Adrar des Ifoghas region, north of Kidal, where the rebels had spent the last decade building up secret camps. It was quite an achievement. Adrar is a perfect natural fortress, with plentiful water and hundreds of caves to conceal small units of fighters.

Success bred complacency in Bamako and Paris. The jihadists had been badly mauled, a new president was elected and billions of dollars of foreign aid were in the pipeline. Mali looked almost reunified; things seemed promising.