Anis Belghoul/Associated Press
Algerian Army vehicles on Sunday near a remote town in southeastern Algeria where hostages were taken in a four-day ordeal.
BAMAKO, Mali — The known death toll from the bloody four-day hostage siege in Algeria rose on Monday after Algerian officials said that security forces combing the scene had discovered many more corpses, some badly burned, at a gas-production complex deep in the Sahara.
With Japan and the Philippines reporting newly confirmed casualties, the Algerian officials also said for the first time that some of the hostage takers were captured alive.
“There are a good 20 bodies,” a senior Algerian official said of the grim discoveries at the site on Sunday, a day after a final assault ended the siege. “These must be identified.”
Once they are, the preliminary count of 23 dead hostages seemed certain to rise, officials acknowledged.
“I’m very afraid that the numbers are going to go up,” the Algerian communications minister, Mohamed Saïd Oublaïd, told France 24 Television.
Despite persistent confusion over the precise number of dead hostages, the minister’s assessment was borne out on Monday when the authorities in Japan and the Philippines reported new fatalities, according to news reports. Citing an unidentified government source, Reuters said Algeria had informed Japan that 9 of its citizens died — the highest death toll by nation reported so far — while previous Japanese accounts had spoken of 10 unaccounted for.
In the Philippines, the Foreign Affairs Department said 6 Filipinos were among the hostages killed, 4 were still missing and 16 had been accounted for.
The standoff between several dozen radical Islamists and Algerian security services came to a bloody conclusion on Saturday when the Algerians assaulted the kidnappers’ last redoubt at the facility, where hundreds of Algerian and scores of expatriate workers were employed.
The victims — from the United States, Britain, France, Japan and other countries — were killed after hours of harrowing captivity in which some were forced to wear explosives. An unknown number of the hostages died in the assault on Saturday; Algerian officials said they also killed most of the remaining hostage takers, who they said were followers of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a warlord linked to Al Qaeda based in northern Mali. A regional Web site reported that he had issued a video claiming responsibility for the attack.
Specifics on exactly who was held hostage, who escaped and who was killed remained patchy and contradictory on Sunday, including the number and status of Americans caught up in the events. One senior American official said that as many as 10 American hostages who were seized at the remote gas field may have died, including one identified as dead by the State Department on Friday. But another American official said that some Americans who were at the site survived. An official with BP, one of the companies operating the complex, identified one surviving American, and the office of a Texas congressman said there was another. A senior Algerian official interviewed on Sunday declared that “seven Americans were liberated.”
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron also revised earlier estimates of fatalities, saying Sunday that three British citizens were confirmed dead and three more were believed to have been killed, along with one resident of Britain who was not a citizen. Earlier, the government had said five Britons and one British resident had died or were unaccounted for.
The confusion over the count of victims reflected the murky circumstances at the gas field, near a remote town in southeastern Algeria called In Amenas. Senior Algerian officials, hundreds of miles away in Algiers, the capital, said they were in the dark themselves about some aspects of the events.
They may learn more from the surviving attackers — Algerian media reports cited by The Associated Press said there were five — that the Algerian authorities said had been captured. Officials said that security forces were scouring the complex on Sunday, looking for booby traps and mines the attackers might have planted, as well as anyone who might still be in hiding. Officials have said that 32 attackers were known to have been killed over the four days.
Official declarations from the Algerian authorities have been sparse. The country’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has hardly spoken about the crisis, even as foreign leaders have demanded details.
While the Algerians have weathered criticism from British, Japanese and other foreign officials over their no-holds-barred handling of the crisis — typical of their approach to a decades-old terrorism problem in Algeria — other foreigners have spoken up to defend it, especially in France, the former colonial power.
Algerians Find Many More Dead at Hostage Site
This article
Algerians Find Many More Dead at Hostage Site
can be opened in url
http://aircraftnewster.blogspot.com/2013/01/algerians-find-many-more-dead-at.html
Algerians Find Many More Dead at Hostage Site
