Islamist militants attacked a gas field in Algeria yesterday, claiming to have kidnapped up to 41 foreigners including seven Americans in a dawn raid in retaliation for France’s intervention in Mali, according to regional media reports.
The raiders were also reported to have killed three people, including a Briton and a French national.
An al-Qaeda affiliated group said the raid had been carried out because of Algeria’s decision to allow France to use its air space for attacks against Islamists in Mali, where French forces have been in action against al Qaeda-linked militants since last week.
The attack in Algeria also raised fears that the French action in Mali could prompt further Islamist revenge attacks on Western targets in Africa, where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) operates across borders in the Sahara desert, and in Europe.
AQIM said it had carried out yesterday’s raid on the In Amenas gas facility in Opec member Algeria, Mauritania’s ANI news agency reported. The Algerian interior ministry said: “A terrorist group, heavily armed and using three vehicles, launched an attack this Wednesday at 5am against a Sonatrach base in Tigantourine, near In Amenas, about 100 kilometres from the Algerian and Libyan border.”
“The Algerian authorities will not respond to the demands of the terrorists and will not negotiate,” Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia was quoted as saying by official news agency APS.
The gas field is operated by a joint venture including BP, Norwegian oil firm Statoil and Algerian state company Sonatrach.
BP said armed men were still occupying facilities at the gas field, which produces nine billion cubic metres of gas a year, more than a tenth of the country’s overall gas output, and 60,000 barrels a day of condensate.
A spokesman for BP said it usually had fewer than 20 people working at the site but would not be drawn on whether there were any talks with the hostage takers.
APS said a Briton and an Algerian security guard had been killed and seven people were injured. A French national was also killed in the attack, a local source said.
Also among those reported kidnapped by various sources were five Japanese nationals working for the Japanese engineering firm JGC Corp, a French national, an Austrian, an Irishman, and a number of Britons.
The US State Department said it believed some US citizens were also among the hostages, while Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg said 13 employees of Statoil, a minority shareholder in the gas venture, were being held.
A member of an Islamist group styling itself the “Blood Battalion” was quoted by Mauritanian media as saying that five of the hostages were being held at the gas facility and 36 were in a housing area. APS said the Islamist raiders had freed Algerians working at the gas facility, though Regis Arnoux, head of French company CIS Catering, told JDD weekly newspaper that 150 Algerian employees of his company were being held at the site. “The operation was in response to the blatant interference by Algeria and the opening of its air space to French aircraft to bomb northern Mali,” the Islamist spokesman told Mauritania’s ANI news agency.
ANI, which has regular direct contact with Islamists, said that fighters under the command of Mokhtar Belmokhtar were holding the foreigners.
Belmokhtar, dubbed by French intelligence as “the uncatchable”, for years commanded al-Qaeda fighters in the Sahara before setting up his own armed Islamist group late last year after an apparent fallout with other militant leaders. The Algerian army was in the area of the gas facility, according to French and Algerian sources.