Mauritanian troops yesterday staged all-out attacks on al-Qaeda’s north African wing, the key suspect in the kidnapping of five French and two African uranium workers, in Mali, security sources said.
“The clashes began on the Mauritania-Mali border, but then moved on to Malian territory at Hassissidi, about 100km north of Timbuktu,” a Malian security source said.
“We are presently in Malian territory and engaged in full combat,” a Mauritanian security source added.
PHOTO: AFP
However, both sources did not specify if the clashes were linked to the abductions.
Before dawn on Thursday, gunmen kidnapped an employee of the French nuclear group Areva and his wife, both French, and five others, including a Togolese and a Madagascan, from Satom, a subsidiary of construction giant Vinci, in Niger.
Security sources in Niger and Algeria said on Friday that the gunmen and their hostages had “crossed the border” between Niger and Mali and were in the Malian desert, security sources said.
The kidnappers carried out an audacious and apparently well-prepared operation, seizing the victims from their homes near Areva’s uranium mine at Arlit, 800km northeast of Niger’s capital, Niamey.
French Defense Minister Herve Morin decided to cut short his trip to Canada on Friday to return home to deal with the kidnapping crisis as a “precautionary” measure, he said.
The French foreign ministry said it had received no claim or ransom demand and could not draw a definitive conclusion about the kidnappers, despite concerns that they may be linked to the north African wing, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).
However, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told Europe 1 radio that “one could imagine it’s the same group, at least the AQIM movement,” adding that he feared it was the same gang that had murdered a French hostage in July.
“But I can’t be certain, because no one has claimed responsibility,” he said.
French and Mauritanian soldiers launched an attack on a suspected al-Qaeda base in the Malian desert on July 22, killing seven militants but failing to find the elderly hostage who was later murdered.
AQIM later called for revenge against France and labeled French President Nicolas Sarkozy an “enemy of God.”
“To the enemy of Allah, Sarkozy, I say: You have missed your opportunity and opened the gates of trouble on your country,” an AQIM leader, Abu Anas al-Shanqiti, said in a statement posted on jihadist forums last month.
A Niger security official also pointed to AQIM, which has carried out several previous kidnappings of Westerners in the vast territory south of the Sahara stretching westwards from Mauritania across Mali and Niger.
The group has also previously moved its hostages to the Malian desert.
“Among the kidnappers, there is believed to be an element of the group led by Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, and the others were acting under orders,” said this source, who believed that Abou Zeid ordered the kidnappings.
Abou Zeid, an Algerian, is the head of the AQIM cell that in April took hostage 78-year-old French aid worker Michel Germaneau, whose execution was announced on July 25 after the failed French military rescue attempt.
A source close to Niger investigators said that the hostage takers had “inside people” in the security force protecting Arlit.
The brother of a hostage, Daniel Larribe, echoed him, saying his sibling had “fears which unfortunately have been confirmed.
“He often told me that his work in Niger was becoming more and more difficult,” he added.
Kouchner also said that the kidnappers “could be Tuaregs working to order” who would sell their hostages “to terrorists.”
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