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Algerian Hostage Standoff Continues as Victims Named Bloody End to Siege of Algerian Gas Field
(about 9 hours later)
BAMAKO, Mali — Islamic militants in Algeria continued to hold at least 10 and possibly dozens of foreign hostages Saturday as details started emerging about some of the people killed in the standoff. BAMAKO, Mali — The hostage crisis in the Algerian desert reached a bloody conclusion Saturday as the army carried out a final assault on the gas field taken over by Islamist militants, killing 11 of them, but only after the militants had killed seven more hostages, the official Algerian news agency reported.
The United States said for the first time that Americans were among the remaining captives and confirmed the first known death of an American hostage, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Tex. Linked In, the social networking site for professionals, lists a Frederick Buttaccio as a sales operations coordinator for BP, the British energy giant that helped run the complex, but a BP executive said it would not comment on any employee who may have been at the facility. French, British and American officials said the Algerian government had told them the military operation was over, but a senior Algerian government official said security forces were “doing cleanup” to make sure no kidnappers were hiding in the sprawling industrial complex.
The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, identified a French citizen who was killed as Yann Desjeux, but he added that “the lives of three others of our compatriots who were on the site during the terrorist attack have been saved.” The country’s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Saturday that the government believed that no more French nationals were being held hostage. Western officials deplored the loss of life during the four-day siege, which Philip Hammond, the British defense secretary, called “appalling and unacceptable.” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who appeared with Mr. Hammond at a news conference in London, said he did not yet have reliable information about the fate of Americans at the facility, although the Algerian official said two had been found “safe and sound.”
As the hostage situation, at a remote gas field complex in eastern Algeria, entered its fourth day, there were no signs of a resolution. A senior Algerian government official said no talks were planned with the militants. Late Saturday, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, emerged from a meeting of the British government’ crisis committee and told reporters that five Britons and one British resident had died in the final battle for the plant. He declined to provide details, saying the government had not yet received a full picture of what happened and that police forces were still fanning out across Britain visiting each of the victims’ families and giving them “the support they need at this very difficult time.”The provisional death toll for the four days released by Algeria Saturday, even by the government’s reckoning, was heavy. Out of dozens taken hostage on a site that employed hundreds of workers, 23 were dead while 32 kidnappers were killed, according to the government news service. That represents close to the initial estimate of hostage-takers.
“They are being told to surrender, that’s it,” the official said. “No negotiations. That is a doctrine with us.” The government said it had recovered machine guns, rocket launchers, suicide belts and small arms.
French television said that shooting had erupted again at the site early Saturday, but gave no details. The Algerian news agency report did not give the nationalities of the hostages it said were executed Saturday, and it remained unclear whether there were other hostages at the remote plant and whether they were alive. Earlier news reports said at least 10 and as many as dozens of hostages from several nations were in the hands of the kidnappers as of Friday.
Two days after the Algerian Army began an assault to try to free the hostages, all foreign governments and companies with citizens at risk were still scrambling for basic information about the missing as they ferried those who had escaped out of the country on military aircraft and urged Algeria to use restraint. The incident is one of the worst mass abductions of foreign workers in years. United States officials had said that “seven or eight” Americans had been at the In Amenas field when it was seized by the militants on Wednesday.
The Norwegian energy firm Statoil said that six of its workers, all of them Norwegian, were unaccounted for. One American, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Tex., was confirmed dead on Friday, and the French government said one of its citizens, identified as Yann Desjeux, had also died before Saturday’s raid. Britain earlier said at least one of its citizens had been killed, and an Algerian state news agency said Algerians had also been killed as of Friday.
“We can never lose hope,” Statoil’s chief executive, Helge Lund, said at a news conference Saturday morning. “Bringing home our employees is our primary goal.” The Algerian official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, said a precise tally would take time.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Washington on Friday that the situation in Algeria was “extremely difficult and dangerous.” “There are corpses that are totally charred,” he said. “We’ve got to do identification work. It’s very difficult.” Algerian officials have said some of the kidnappers blew themselves up. The Algerian news agency said the militants had set fire to part of the complex Friday night, which prompted the troops to launch the military assault Saturday.
Describing a conversation she had earlier Friday with Algeria’s prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, Mrs. Clinton said she had emphasized to him that “the utmost care must be taken to preserve innocent life.” The raid, if it swept up all the attackers, would bring to an end a siege involving dozens of hostages and kidnappers that drew criticism from Western governments for the tough manner in which it was handled by the Algerian security services. Attacks on the kidnappers by the government forces caused an unknown number of deaths among the hostages, in addition to those who were executed by the militants, who may be linked to Al Qaeda.
Algeria’s state news agency, A.P.S., said 12 Algerian and foreign workers had been killed since Algerian special forces began an assault against the kidnappers on Thursday. It was the highest civilian death toll that Algerian officials have provided in the aftermath of the raid, which freed some captives and killed kidnappers. A militant who claimed responsibility for the attack, and who was blamed by the Algerians for leading it, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was until recently a leading commander of Al Qaeda’s North and West African branch, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Previous unofficial estimates of the foreign casualties have ranged from 4 to 35. The American who died, Mr. Buttaccio, lived in a gated community in Katy, a suburb about 30 miles west of downtown Houston. One Algerian who managed to escape told France 24 television late Friday night that the kidnappers said, “We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.” The haggard-looking man, interviewed at the airport in Algiers, said the kidnappers then immediately executed five hostages.
The Algerian news agency also said that 18 militants had been killed and that the country’s special forces were dealing with remnants of a “terrorist group” that was still holding hostages in the refinery area of the gas field. The militants who attacked the plant said it was in retaliation for French troops sweeping into Mali this month to stop an advance of Islamist rebels south toward the capital. However the militants later said they had been planning an attack in Algeria for two months on the assumption that the West would intervene in Mali.
The report also gave a new sense of how many people may have been at the facility when the militants seized it Wednesday, asserting that nearly 650 people had managed to leave the site since then, including 573 Algerians and nearly half of the 132 foreigners it said had been abducted. But that still left many people unaccounted for. The Algerian state oil company, Sonatrach, said Saturday that the attackers had evidently mined the facility with the intention of blowing it up and that the company was working to disable the mines.
The senior Algerian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he believed there were about 10 hostages under the control of possibly 13 to 15 militants, but he emphasized that “nothing is certain” about the numbers, which have varied wildly since the crisis began. He also said that there were other workers on the site “who are still in hiding” but that the military had secured the residential part of the gas-field complex, which is near the town of In Amenas. The Algerian government has rejected the criticism of its go-it-alone approach, toughest from the British and Japanese governments whose nationals were among those kidnapped, saying they have had years of experience dealing with terrorist attacks. The Algerian government has also denied that it started the confrontation on Thursday, saying troops, who began their assault by firing on a convoy, were merely responding to the militants’ attempts to leave the field with hostages.
“What remains are a few terrorists, holding a few hostages, who have taken refuge in the gas factory,” he said. “It’s a site that’s very tricky to handle.” The government official, however, acknowledged Saturday morning that the militant attack was of a scale and complexity the country had not experienced before.
The official also challenged the criticism made in some foreign capitals that the Algerian military had acted hastily and with excessive force. On the contrary, he said, Algerian forces had returned fire only as the militants sought to escape the complex with their captives. “This was a multinational operation,” he said of the kidnappers. “They’ve come from all over, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania. It’s the first time we’ve handled something on this scale. This one is different, it’s of another dimension,” he said.
“There was a reaction by the army,” he said. “They tried to flee and they were stopped,” the official said of the militants. “They came absolutely to blow the whole site up. These are bitter-enders.” Nonetheless, the brazenness of the assault — dozens of fighters attacking one of the country’s most important gas-producing facilities — is likely to call into question Algeria’s much vaunted security strategy in dealing with the Islamic militants who shelter in its southern deserts, near the border with Mali.
Earlier Friday, the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that not all Americans had been freed. “We have American hostages,” she said, offering the first update on what was known about United States citizens since officials confirmed on Thursday that seven or eight of them had been inside the gas-field complex. The Algerians have made a virtue out of keeping a lid on these militants, pushing them toward Mali in a strategy of modified containment, and ruthlessly stamping them out when they attempt an attack in the interior of the country. So far it has worked, and Algeria’s extensive oil and gas fields, extremely important revenue sources, have been protected.
Ms. Nuland also said the United States would not consider a reported offer made by the kidnappers to exchange two Americans for two prominent figures imprisoned in the United States — Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted of plotting to bomb New York landmarks, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman convicted of shooting two American soldiers in Afghanistan. It was impossible to confirm that offer, which was reported by the Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group, a service that tracks jihadi activity on the Internet. That relative success had allowed Algeria to take a hands-off approach to the Islamist conquest of northern Mali in recent months, even as Western governments pleaded with it to become more directly involved in confronting the militants, who move across the hazy border between the two countries.
A spokesman for the militants, who belong to a group called Al Mulathameen, said Friday that they planned further attacks in Algeria, according to a report by the Mauritanian news agency A.N.I., which maintains frequent contact with militant groups in the region. The spokesman called upon Algerians to “keep away from the installations of foreign companies because we will suddenly attack where no one would expect it,” A.N.I. reported. But now, with last week’s attack, Algeria may have to rethink its approach, analysts suggest, and engage in a more frontal strategy against the Islamists.
The Algerian military operation to end the gas-field siege was done without consulting foreign governments whose citizens worked at the facility. It has been marked by a fog of conflicting reports, compounded by the remoteness of the facility, which is hundreds of miles across the desert from the Algerian capital, Algiers, and close to the Libyan border. The senior government official appeared to acknowledge this in the interview Saturday, saying: “This has international implications. This is not just about us, it’s international.”
In London, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament that the number of Britons at risk was estimated late Thursday at “less than 30.” That number has now been “quite significantly reduced,” he said, adding that he could not give details because the crisis was continuing. British officials have said they know at least one Briton was killed when the militants seized the facility. If the outcome represents a relative setback for Algeria, it could be viewed as a decided victory for the Islamists who carried out the assault on the gas plant, achieving several of their shared perennial goals: killing large numbers of Westerners and disrupting states they have put on their enemies list — including Algeria.
Offering a broad account of Algeria’s handling of the operation, Mr. Cameron told lawmakers: “We were not informed of this in advance. I was told by the Algerian prime minister while it was taking place. He said that the terrorists had tried to flee, that they judged there to be an immediate threat to the lives of the hostages and had felt obliged to respond.” Indeed, the militants said Friday they planned more attacks in Algeria, in a report carried on a Mauritanian news site that often carries their statements.
Frustration with Algeria’s information vacuum seemed particularly vexing to Japan, where an energy company that had assigned 17 employees to the gas-field facility said Friday that seven were confirmed safe but that 10 were unaccounted for. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had personally appealed to his Algerian counterpart by phone early Friday to stop the military action, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported, but was told that military action was “the best response and we are continuing our operation.”

Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris, Elisabeth Bumiller from London and John F. Burns from Oxford, England.

A separate hostage situation of sorts appeared to have been averted at a village in Mali, the neighboring country where a French military intervention to stop Islamist militants may have been the catalyst for the Algerian gas-field seizure by the Al Mulathameen group. But details were sketchy. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
A senior French official in Paris said Malian Islamist fighters, threatened by French and Malian soldiers, had occupied the village, Diabaly, and were threatening to use residents as human shields if attacked. But by Friday evening, a local official in Diabaly said the Islamists and most of the villagers had fled. “There’s practically nothing left in Diabaly except burned-out vehicles and boxes of ammunition,” said the official, Benco Ba, a local parliamentary deputy. Correction: January 19, 2013
The Algerian fighters had been prepared to attack the gas complex for nearly two months, the militants’ spokesman said, according to the ANI report, because they believed that the Algerian government “was surely going to be the ally of France” in the Malian conflict.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the nationality of a government official who said security forces were searching the gas complex. The official is Algerian, not Turkish.

Hostages and analysts have said the attackers appeared well-prepared and deeply knowledgeable about the site, and there was evidence to suggest they had informers on the site or were in contact with workers there. An official at BP indicated earlier in the week that the attackers had shut off production at the site at the time of the attack, for instance. And at least two former hostages, interviewed independently, have said the fighters were aware of labor tensions and plans for a strike among catering workers on the site.
“We know you’re oppressed; we’ve come here so that you can have your rights,” the militants told Algerians on the site, according to one former hostage. Another hostage said the fighters had asked about the plans for a strike.

Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako, and Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong. Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, John F. Burns and Julia Werdigier from London; Alan Cowell, Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris; Michael R. Gordon, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker from Washington; Martin Fackler and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo; Clifford Krauss and Manny Fernandez from Houston; and Rick Gladstone from New York.