Nossiter, Sayare and Cowell report: "A tense and confusing standoff developed Thursday between government forces and armed attackers holding dozens of hostages, including Americans and other foreigners, at an internationally managed gas field in Algeria."



In retaliation for the French intervention in Mali, militants have taken hostages in Algeria. (photo: Joe Penney/Reuters)

Hostage Crisis in Algeria Turns Deadly

By Adam Nossiter, Scott Sayare and Alan Cowell, The New York Times

he Algerian military launched an operation against armed Islamist extremists holding dozens of hostages, including Americans and other foreigners, at a remote gas field on Thursday, diplomats and other government officials said, and there were unconfirmed reports of multiple casualties.

The military operation, confirmed by the governments of Japan and Britain, which said they had been informed by Algerian authorities, came more than 24 hours after the armed extremists seized the hostages at the internationally managed gas field near the Libyan border in retaliation for the French military intervention in Mali last week.

News reports said that some captives had escaped and others had been caught up in the fighting but there was no independent corroboration of reports quoting kidnappers as saying Algerian army helicopters strafing the field had killed 35 hostages and 15 kidnappers.

News agencies in Algeria and neighboring Mauritania said the helicopters may have attacked when the kidnappers sought to move their hostages from one part of the installation to another.

British officials in London said Algerian authorities had informed them that an "operation" was under way at the remote location in the desert, but gave no further details. "It remains an ongoing situation," one official said, speaking in return for anonymity under departmental rules. Japanese authorities were still trying to ascertain if any Japanese hostages had escaped, the top Japanese government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, told a news conference.

The situation is "very confused," President François Hollande of France said at a news conference in Paris and was "evolving hour by hour." Mr. Hollande confirmed for the first time officially that French citizens were among the captives.

The kidnapping in Algeria was a retaliation for the continuing French military assault on Islamist extremists in Mali that has escalated into a much broader conflict spilling beyond Mali and North Africa to the United States and other countries with citizens held hostage. Reuters said the survivors of the Algerian assault included hostages from the United States, Belgium, Japan and Britain. The full extent of the casualties was not immediately clear.

Before reports of an assault began to emerge, many hostages - both Algerian and foreign - had escaped as the kidnappers sought and failed to persuade Algerian authorities to give them safe passage with their captives.

The Algerian news Web site TSA, quoted a local official, Sidi Knaoui, as saying 10 foreign hostages and 40 Algerians. Mr. Knaoui said he had been scheduled to meet with the hostage takers in an attempt at negotiations. He could not be reached for confirmation.

Other Algerian news reports said that 30 Algerian hostages and 15 foreigners escaped, but there was no immediate independent confirmation of that account. The Associated Press, quoting an unidentified Algerian official, said 20 foreigners, including some Americans, had escaped.

Earlier, a French television station, France 24, quoted an unidentified hostage as saying the attackers "were heavily armed and forced several hostages to wear explosives belts. They threatened to blow up the gas field if Algerian forces attempted to enter the site," the station reported.

The Qatar-based Al Jazeera channel also quoted a hostage identified as British as saying the captives were "receiving care and good treatment from the kidnappers" but Algerian forces surrounding the installations were "firing at the camp."

Both stations said it was unclear whether the people they interviewed had been speaking under duress. Al Jazeera quoted a kidnapper as demanding that the Algerian Army pull back to permit negotiations to end the crisis.

Apart from foreign hostages, said by the attackers to number 41, a large number of Algerians were also seized. Some 40 of them, mainly women working as translators, had been freed, Reuters quoted Algeria's Ennahar television station as saying, although it was not clear if this was the same group as had earlier been reported as escaping.

Algerian officials said at least two people, including a Briton, were killed in the initial assault on the gas facility, which began with an ambush on a bus trying to ferry workers to an airport. It was depicted by the attackers as reprisal for the French intervention in Mali and also to punish Algeria for allowing French warplanes to use its airspace to reach targets in northern Mali.

The British Foreign Office confirmed that a British citizen had been killed in what Foreign Secretary William Hague called an "extremely dangerous situation."

Hundreds of Algerian security forces surrounded the gas-field compound and the country's interior minister said there would be no negotiations.

Algeria's official news agency said at least 20 fighters had carried out the attack and mass abduction. There were unconfirmed reports late on Wednesday that the security forces had tried to storm the compound and had retreated under gunfire from the hostage takers.

Many details of the assault on the gas field in a barren desert site near Libya's border remained murky, including the precise number of hostages. American, French, British, Japanese and Norwegian citizens who worked at the field were known to be among them, officials said.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called the attack a terrorist act and said the United States was weighing a response. His statement suggested that the Obama administration could be drawn into a military entanglement in North Africa that it had been seeking to keep at arm's length - even as it has conceded that the region has become a new haven for extremists who threaten Western security and vital interests.

The attack appeared to make good on a pledge by the Islamist militants who seized northern Mali last year to sharply expand their struggle against the West in response to France's military intervention that began last week.

It also doubled, at least, the number of non-African hostages that Islamist militants in northern and western Africa have been using as bargaining chips to finance themselves in recent years through ransoms that have totaled millions of dollars.

But there was no indication that the attackers wanted money, and no other demands or ultimatums were issued. In a statement sent to ANI, a Mauritanian news agency, they demanded the "immediate halt of the aggression against our own in Mali."

The statement, made by a group called Al Mulathameen, which has links to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the North African affiliate of Al Qaeda, claimed it was holding more than 40 "crusaders" - apparently a reference to non-Muslims - "including seven Americans, two French, two British as well as other citizens of various European nationalities." Algeria's interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, said that the raid was overseen by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and has reportedly established his own group in the Sahara after falling out with other local Qaeda leaders.

Mr. Belmokhtar is known to French intelligence officials as "the Uncatchable" and to some locals as "Mister Marlboro" for his illicit cigarette-running business. His ties to Islamist extremists who seized towns across northern Mali last year are unclear, though he is thought to be based in the Malian city of Gao.

The gas-field attack coincided with an escalation of the fight inside Mali, according to Western and Malian officials, as French ground troops, joined by soldiers of the Malian Army, engaged in combat with Islamist fighters. The officials said the French-Malian units had begun to beat back the Islamist militant advance southward from northern Mali, a move that had provoked the intervention ordered by President Hollande of France.

"The setting in motion of a military machine in north Mali was going to have definite repercussions in Algeria," said Mohamed Chafik Mesbah, a former Algerian Army officer and political scientist, adding, . "There are going to be much worse consequences. There will be more attacks."

The facility is the fourth-largest gas development in Algeria, a major oil producer and OPEC member. The In Amenas gas compression plant is operated by BP of Britain, the Norwegian company Statoil and the Algerian national oil company Sonatrach.

Islamist groups and bandits have long operated in the deserts of western and northern Africa, and a collection of Islamists have occupied the vast expanse of northern Mali since a government crisis in that country last March. Those groups, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had pledged to strike against France's interests on the continent and abroad, as well as those of nations backing the French operations. In France, security has been reinforced at airports, train stations and other public spaces.

The militant groups are financed in large part through ransoms paid for the freeing of Western hostages, and regular kidnappings have occurred in the West African desert in recent years. At least seven French citizens are presently being held there, officials say.

Oil and gas are central to the Algerian economy, accounting for more than a third of the country's gross domestic product, over 95 percent of its export earnings and 60 percent of government financial receipts. Algeria is an important gas supplier to France, Spain, Turkey, Italy and Britain. Reuters said on Thursday that the flow of Algerian gas to Italy had slowed slightly and traders blamed the hostage crisis.