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Scenes of Terror at Gas Field: Hostages Bound to Explosives
Hiding, Praying, Tied to Bombs: Captives Detail Algerian Ordeal
(about 11 hours later)
PARIS — Hostages who escaped or were freed from their Islamist captors at the natural-gas field in Algeria have described scenes of fear and terror. Some said they had explosives hung around their necks, and others spoke of the sudden shooting of unarmed colleagues as the terrorist group seized control of the residential quarters of the plant.
The gunmen, dressed in fatigues and wearing turbans, stormed in well before dawn aboard pickup trucks, announcing their arrival with a burst of gunfire.
The drama began at about 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday with an attack on a bus carrying workers to the nearby airport that was thwarted by Algerian security escorts. It turned into a major hostage-taking as well-armed and experienced Islamists took over the facility’s residential area, which is situated at a distance from the plant to protect workers should an explosion occur.
Dozens of employees were eating breakfast at the time before heading off to the vast network of tubes and silos of the In Amenas gas field, where hundreds of Algerians and foreigners work to extract natural gas from the arid sands of the Sahara.
A Briton called his wife while he was being taken hostage, saying he had been forced to sit at his desk with Semtex, an explosive, strapped to his chest. After the man, Garry Barlow, 49, called his wife, Lorraine, 52, The Daily Mail reported, she informed the Foreign Office that an attack was under way. “He rang home and told his wife the complex had been taken over by what they thought then was the mujahedeen,” a friend told the newspaper.
“God is great,” the gunmen cried as they arrived.
“He said: ‘I’m sat here at my desk with Semtex strapped to my chest. The local army have already tried and failed to storm the plant, and they’ve said that if that happens again they are going to kill us all,’ ” the friend said. Mr. Barlow’s fate is not yet clear.
It was the beginning of a terrifying ordeal — one in which foreign hostages would come under fire from both the gunmen holding them and the Algerian government soldiers trying to free them. For many of the captives, it is an ordeal that has yet to end.
Al Mulathameen, the Islamist group that has claimed responsibility for the attack, has made clear in statements to Mauritanian news outlets that foreign citizens were explicitly targeted.
Some hostages were forced to wear explosives on their bodies. Others hid under beds and on rooftops, praying to survive but expecting death. One was shot in the back while his fellow captives looked on. Left by their captors with their cellphones, some phoned home with terrifying accounts of the horrors unfolding all around.
According to an Algerian man who worked on the site and escaped on Thursday afternoon, foreigners were separated from Algerian workers. The attackers told Algerians that they were their “brothers,” the man said, speaking on the condition of anonymity from In Amenas, the city not far from the gas site.
These were among the chilling tales recounted Friday by some of the hundreds of workers who managed to escape the national gas field on the eastern edge of Algeria that had been stormed by Islamist militants two days before.
Perhaps 40 people, including 9 foreigners, were eating breakfast in the cafeteria at the site at about 5:30 a.m. when they heard gunshots, the man said. They remained in place until fighters entered the cafeteria at about 9 or 10 and began to separate the Algerians from the foreign workers, whose hands they bound. Five dark-skinned foreigners hid among the Algerians and were allowed to leave with them when they were directed into a separate building nearby, the man said. Workers whom the man identified as Pakistanis were placed among other foreigners, but argued with the attackers that, like them, they were Muslims; it was not clear how the attackers responded.
The gunmen, fighters with a group called Al Mulathameen, said they were acting to avenge the French intervention in nearby Mali, Algerian officials said. But there were indications that the attack had been planned long before the French military began its offensive to recapture the northern half of that country from Islamist insurgents.
Many of the attackers spoke with non-Algerian accents, the man said, and he suggested that some of them may have been Libyan and Syrian, along with Algerians. One of the fighters was French, the man said.
The attackers appeared to know the site well, even the fact that disgruntled Algerian catering workers were planning a strike.
At one point, he said, the fighters shot a European man in the back in the presence of other hostages. It was not clear why he had been shot, the man said, and he did not know if the man was alive or dead. He claimed that there had been several executions, but that he had not been present for them.
“We know you’re oppressed, we’ve come here so that you can have your rights,” the militants told Algerians at the facility, according to one Algerian former hostage. Another hostage said the fighters had asked about the plans for a strike.
On Thursday afternoon, the fighters urged him to leave the site with other Algerians. They boarded a bus and rode toward the perimeter of the site, where security forces halted and searched them. The five foreigners who had claimed to be Algerian were among those to escape, the man said.
“The terrorists were covered with explosives, and they had detonators,” said a senior Algerian government official briefed on the crisis. He said the situation remained a standoff on Friday, with “a few terrorists holding a few hostages.”
One French hostage, who works for the catering company CIS at the facility, said he hid in a room away from other foreign hostages, arranging planks of wood to conceal his presence, and survived thanks to food brought by Algerian colleagues.
Former captives said that several of the fighters appeared to be foreign, with non-Algerian accents. One Algerian worker said that some of them may have been Libyan and Syrian, and that one might have been French. Another gunman who spoke impeccable English was assigned to speak to the many foreigners.
The man, Alexandre Berceaux, told Europe 1 radio after his release that the hostage-taking on Wednesday was a complete surprise. “I heard an enormous amount of gunfire,” he said. “The alarm telling us to stay where we were was going off. I didn’t know if it was a drill or if it was real. Nobody expected this. The site was protected. There were soldiers in place.”
When the Algerian military eventually intervened, the situation grew even more chaotic. According to one witness, Algerian helicopters attacked several jeeps that were carrying hostages. The fate of at least some of those hostages remains unknown, as the Algerian state news agency reported that 12 Algerian and foreign workers had been killed since the start of the military operation and that dozens remained unaccounted for.
He described “intervals of heavy fire” on Thursday, when the Algerian military tried to storm the site, using helicopters.
From the start, it was clear that the gunmen only wished to harm foreigners. Algerian workers, along with other Muslims who could prove their faith by reciting from the Koran, were herded into one area, workers said.
“I stayed hidden for nearly 40 hours in my bedroom,” he said. “I was under the bed, and I put boards everywhere just in case. I had a bit of food, a bit to drink; I didn’t know how long it would last.”
“They told us, ‘We are your brothers. You have telephones: call your families to reassure them,’ ” said Moussa, an Algerian worker who asked to be identified only by his first name.
He said he was sure he would be killed. “When the military came to get me, I did not know whether it was over,” he said. The soldiers came with Algerian colleagues, he said, “otherwise I would never have opened the door.”
Algerian women in the group of hostages were released right away on Wednesday morning, Moussa said, but the militants initially declined to release the Algerian men, saying it was for their own good. “We’re afraid that if we free you, the army will shoot at you,” he quoted them as saying.
Mr. Berceaux said Algerian soldiers found some British hostages hiding on the roof and were still searching the site for others when he was escorted to a nearby military base, from which he expected to be transferred to France. “I think there are still people hidden,” he said. “They are in the process of doing a count now.”
Foreigners, meanwhile, were taken away, their hands bound with rubber, both Algerian witnesses said. Some of the employees resisted. Several Filipino workers who had refused to leave their rooms were beaten, Moussa said. At one point, the fighters shot a European as he tried to flee, he said. The other Algerian described seeing a middle-aged European man, perhaps a security official, shot in the back in the cafeteria, where the lights had been switched off. He believed the man had died.
A hostage who escaped unharmed on Thursday said the Algerian Army bombed four jeeps carrying fellow captives and probably killed many of them, his brother told Reuters. The hostage, Stephen McFaul, an Irishman, told his family that he survived because he was aboard the only one of five jeeps not hit by Algerian bombs on Thursday, according to his brother Brian, who spoke to Stephen’s wife, Angela.
Before being captured, Stephen McFaul, 36, an electrical engineer from Belfast, barricaded himself in a room with a colleague at the first sound of gunfire, quietly using his cellphone to assure his family that he was all right.
“They were moving five jeeploads of hostages from one part of the compound,” Brian McFaul said. “At that stage they were intercepted by the Algerian Army. The army bombed four out of five of the trucks, and four of them were destroyed.” The truck Stephen McFaul was in crashed, and “at that stage Stephen was able to make a break for his freedom,” his brother said. “He presumed everyone else in the other trucks was killed.”
“I joked that I was from Northern Ireland and that I had been through better riots,” he told the colleague, according to John Morrissey, a representative for his family in Belfast who was responding to reporters for media organizations around the world.
Mr. McFaul, his brother said, said that some of the hostages had their mouths taped and explosives hung from around their necks.
Mr. McFaul, who had been sent to work in Algeria only three weeks ago, was seized a few hours later, Mr. Morrissey said, and ultimately placed in the last jeep of a five-jeep convoy that came under heavy air attack from Algerian forces.
Another French former hostage, who was unnamed, told France24 television that the Islamists attacked both the gas plant and the residential quarters at the same time. He said the militants were heavily armed and tied explosive belts around some hostages, threatening to blow up the gas plant if the Algerian Army intervened. “They entered the interior, and once it was daylight, they assembled everyone together,” the hostage said.
The first four jeeps were destroyed, and when Mr. McFaul’s vehicle veered off the road, he and a fellow worker managed to climb out of the back window, which had been broken. Their hands had been tied, their mouths taped and they had been forced to wear vests loaded with explosives, Mr. Morrissey said.
Yann Desjeux, 52, also French and a former hostage, told the newspaper Sud Ouest that he was kept with 34 other hostages of nine nationalities, while 6 others were kept hostage in the gas plant.
The two made a run for it, reaching the security forces, who disarmed the explosives.
Jo Calmette, a French tourist who had camped out in In Amenas on Wednesday night, told the newspaper Midi Libre that he had met some of the hostages who escaped the gas plant after the Islamist assault. He spoke to a French nurse identified as Murielle at the local police station of In Amenas. “She told me that the Islamist commando had given them orders to stay in their bungalows, but at night, with a group of Algerian friends, they managed to cut up the wire fence and escape,” Mr. Calmette said.
The spokesman said Mr. McFaul was “bright and together and nervously excited” about returning home.
The nurse said she escaped with Algerians but also with an American, a Briton and another Westerner. “They escaped and ran into the Algerian Army right away,” Mr. Calmette said.
Other foreigners like Alexandre Berceaux, a French employee of a catering company working at the site, hid themselves as best they could.
Khaled, an Algerian engineer for Sonatrach, an Algerian hydrocarbons company, told L’Express that he escaped captivity when the Algerian Army assaulted the plant on Thursday. He did not see the initial attack on the bus taking foreigners to the airport, he said, but soon afterward he saw about a dozen pickup trucks with the militants, whom he called Salafists. “I don’t know exactly how they infiltrated the site,” he said. “I heard bursts, heavy gunfire.” He said the leader of the commandos came and told them to call him “Belaouar,” and said he would release the locals quickly. “It was the foreigners that interested him,” Khaled said. “They only wanted them.”
“I stayed hidden for nearly 40 hours in my bedroom,” Mr. Berceaux told Europe 1 Radio. “I was under the bed, and I put boards everywhere just in case. I had food, water; I didn’t know how long I would be there.”
The locals were allowed to have their cellphones to call their families, Khaled said. “But it soon became impossible to get in touch with anyone,” he said. “Someone told me they had liberated women, but I didn’t see that.”
He said he was certain he would be killed. “When the Algerian soldiers, whom I thank, came to get me, I didn’t even know it was over,” he said. The soldiers came with his colleagues, he said, “otherwise I would never have opened the door.”
During the army assault, he said, he was in the game room. “There was a stampede,” he said, and some people forced open the security door. “Then we all started to run.”
Mr. Berceaux said Algerian soldiers found some British hostages hiding on the roof and were still searching the site for others when he was escorted to a nearby military base, from which he expected to be transferred to France. Others might still be hidden, he said.
Scott
Sayare contributed reporting.
Among the casualties was a French citizen identified as Yann Desjeux, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in a statement on Friday evening. Mr. Desjeux had contacted his family by telephone midday on Thursday and died sometime later, according to the French newspaper Sud Ouest, which also had spoken to Mr. Desjeux on Thursday.
The newspaper said a freelance journalist had dialed up a militant he had been in contact with previously and discovered that the man was involved in the raid on the factory. The journalist asked if any Frenchmen were captives and the militant then passed the phone to Mr. Desjeux, 52, who said he was being well treated and that the captors wanted the French government to warn Algeria not to raid the factory.
The circumstances of his death were not clear.
Adam Nossiter contributed reporting from Bamako, Mali, and Douglas Dalby from Dublin.
