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Death Toll Rises in Algerian Standoff; More Corpses Found Algerians Find Many More Dead At Hostage Site
(about 3 hours later)
BAMAKO, Mali — Algerian officials said Sunday that the death toll from the four-day hostage siege at a gas-producing complex in the Sahara was growing as security forces combed the site and discovered more corpses, some badly burned. BAMAKO, Mali — Algerian officials said Sunday that security forces combing the scene of a bloody four-day hostage siege had discovered many more corpses, some badly burned, at a gas-production complex deep in the Sahara.
A senior Algerian official said “a good 20” more bodies were found Sunday morning, though it was unclear whether they were militants or hostages. The official said that at least seven Americans were “liberated,” and that some militants were captured. They also said for the first time that some of the hostage takers were captured alive.
“There are corpses that haven’t been identified,” the official said. “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.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 Said Belaid, told France 24 Television. Over a dozen hostages were still missing on Sunday, including some Americans, officials said. “I’m very afraid that the numbers are going to go up,” the Algerian communications minister, Mohamed Saïd Oublaïd, told France 24 Television.
The confrontation at a remote gas field taken over by militants ended Saturday as the Algerian Army carried out a final assault. The details of the desert standoff and the final battle for the plant remained murky — as did information about which hostages died and how. 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.
Still, new details emerged on Sunday. The attackers were a multinational group from six countries, Mr. Belaid told the official APS news agency. He would not identify the countries by name, but other senior officials said that there were indications that the group originated in northern Mali and was once linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda’s North African branch. 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, an 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.
It was not clear how many attackers were involved, although Algerian officials said at least 32 were killed. For the first time on Sunday, Algerian officials said that some attackers were captured, contrary to earlier reports that they were all killed. 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 all of the American hostages who were seized at the remote gas field had died, including one identified as dead by the State Department on Friday and as many as nine others.
An Algerian jihadist, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who is based in Mali and has ties to Al Qaeda, has claimed responsibility through spokesmen for masterminding the raid. Algeria also blames him for the attack. But another American official said that some of the Americans 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.”
The militants said the assault was carried out in retaliation for the French troops sent to Mali this month to stop an advance of Islamist rebels south toward the capital, although they later said they had been planning an attack in Algeria for some time. 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 fighting began with heavy gunfire early Wednesday, and continued through a fierce, helicopter-led government assault on Thursday. Most of the hundreds of workers at the plant, who came from about 25 countries, appeared to escape sometime during the four days. 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.
The total number of people who were held hostage remained unclear on Sunday. There was also some questions about the aggressive tactics used by the Algerian Army. Western leaders have criticized the Algerian government for failing to consult them before the military action. They may learn more from the attackers that the Algerian authorities said had been captured alive. 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.
Initial reports from Algerian state news media said that seven workers had been executed during the army’s raid, but the senior government official and another high-level official, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, later said the number killed and the causes of death were unknown. 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.
What little information trickled out from survivors was harrowing. Some hostages who managed to escape told of workers being forced to wear explosives. They also said that there were several summary executions and that some workers had died in the military’s initial rescue attempt. 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.
Alan Wright, a British survivor, said in an interview with Sky News that he spent about two days hiding in an office complex with about 30 workers listening to the sounds of gunfire outside. The majority, he said, were Algerian citizens who he said could have left him and his colleagues. Instead, he said, they helped them escape by dressing them as local residents and cutting through several perimeter fences. They were rescued by Algerian soldiers. The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in a radio interview on Sunday that he was “shocked” that Algeria has been criticized for its response to terrorists who “pillage, rape and ransack.” He said “there can be no impunity for terrorists” and that efforts to combat them “must be relentless.” The death toll at the gas field was “very high,” he said, but the Algerian authorities faced an “intolerable situation” there, Mr. Fabius said.
“I can’t say enough about the guys in our building, who had the option to surrender and be safe,” he said. “You’ll be in debt to them for the rest of your life.” Algerian officials said from the outset that any sort of negotiation with the kidnappers was out of the question. Their response with overwhelming force — including missile-firing helicopters — was in character with the brutal 10-year war Algeria waged against Islamist insurgents in the 1990s, when tens of thousands of people died. Mr. Belmokhtar, the leader of the group that apparently staged the gas-field attack, is himself a veteran of that war.
He also praised the Algerian military: “If it weren’t for them, I think it would have been a lot worse.” A former BP executive, who knows In Amenas and the North African oil business well, said in an interview that Mr. Belmokhtar had been on the industry’s radar as a potential threat for a decade or more. The executive said Mr. Belmokhtar, though not a member of the Tuareg ethnic group himself, often used the desert tracks that the Tuaregs use to roam among the remote desert areas of Libya, Mali, Niger and Algeria. Some of those routes pass near the In Amenas gas field.
In public remarks on Sunday, Western leaders called for a decisive and far-reaching response to the attack, indicating a willingness to expand military operations in North Africa to counter deeply rooted Islamist militant groups. The scale of the operation, which supplies about 5 percent of Algeria’s gas output, and its remote location near the Libyan border meant that it was standard procedure for military escorts to accompany workers on every journey to or from distant wells, the airport or the town of In Amenas, the former executive said. He described the town as a base for the regional operations of the energy companies that operate the gas field — BP, Statoil of Norway and Sonatrach, the Algerian national oil company — as well as oil-services companies like Halliburton, Schlumberger and JGC, the Japanese company that had employees among the hostages.
“We have had successes in recent years in reducing the threat from some parts of the world, but the threat has grown, particularly in North Africa,” Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said in a televised address. Mr. Belmokhtar is believed to have been involved in a series of kidnappings of European tourists for ransom in 2003, but obtaining money does not seem to have been the main purpose of the gas field raid; rather, he reportedly claimed a political motive.
“This is a global threat, and it will require a global response,” he said. “It will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months. It requires a response that is patient and painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve, and that is what we will deliver over these coming years.” “We in Al Qaeda announce this blessed operation,” Mr. Belmokhtar says in the video he issued on Sunday, according to Sahara Media, a regional Web site that sometimes receives communications from radical Islamists in North Africa. Sahara Media quoted from the video in its report, but did not immediately post the video.
He added: “What we face is an extremist, Islamist, Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group. Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in North Africa.” The Web site said Mr. Belmokhtar offered to negotiate with “the West and the Algerian government, provided they stop their bombing of Mali’s Muslims” — a reference to the French-led military intervention in Mali. The statement was dismissed by Algerian authorities on Sunday.
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, captured that sentiment succinctly, telling France 5 television that the attack on the oil facility was “an act of war.” Even so, it was another signal that the events at the gas field were linked in some way to those in Mali. French forces have stepped in there to assist the Malian Army and other African troops as they try to roll back the advance of radical Islamists who have carved out a ministate in the north.

Adam Nossiter reported from Mali, and Michael Schwirtz from New York. Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris; Alan Cowell, Elisabeth Bumiller, John F. Burns and Stanley Reed from London; Manny Fernandez and Clifford Krauss from Houston; and Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

That campaign is preceding largely through airstrikes against columns of Islamist pickup trucks; French television showed images on Sunday of incinerated vehicles in Diabaly, a town that was overrun and then abandoned by the jihadists after French strikes throughout the week.
French officials aid the main task for now was to stabilize central Mali and ensure that there was no further attempt by the Islamist rebels to move south toward the capital, Bamako.

Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris; Alan Cowell and Stanley Reed from London; Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon from Washington; and Michael Schwirtz from New York.