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Algeria Defends Tough Response to Hostage Crisis as Toll Rises
(about 5 hours later)
ALGIERS — Algeria’s prime minister said Monday that at least 37 foreign hostages died during the four-day siege in his country, a steep increase from earlier estimates, and the United States government confirmed that three Americans were among them.
ALGIERS — The prime minister of Algeria offered an unapologetic defense on Monday of the country’s tough actions to end the Sahara hostage crisis, saying that the militants who had carried out the kidnappings intended to kill all their captives and that the army saved many from death by attacking.
In his first official tally of the deadly scope of the crisis, the prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, also said that five foreigner hostages remained unaccounted for. Twenty-nine kidnappers were killed, including the leader of the group, he said, and three were captured alive during the ordeal that terrorized a remote internationally run gas field refining site in the desert.
But the assertion came as the death toll of foreign hostages rose sharply, to 37, and as American officials said they had offered sophisticated surveillance help that could minimize casualties, both before and during the military operation to retake a seized gas field complex in the Algerian desert.
Two of the attackers were Canadian, he said. Canada’s government said it was investigating that assertion.
At least some of the assistance was accepted, they said, but there were still questions about whether Algeria had taken all available steps to avert such a bloody outcome.
Algerian officials had been forecasting that the tally of foreign dead would rise from a preliminary estimate of 23, a concern that was reinforced by reports that a significant number of hostages from Japan and the Philippines had been killed at the site. On Monday, the Algerian prime minister said the dead came from eight different nations, without specifying which ones. He said that one Algerian hostage had been killed as well.
American counterterrorism officials and experts said detailed surveillance could have given the Algerians an information advantage to outmaneuver the militants. But others declined to second-guess the Algerians, saying events had unfolded so rapidly that the government might have felt it had no choice but to kill the kidnappers, even if hostages died as well.
Mr. Sellal was more specific about the attackers, saying at the news conference that they had come from Egypt, Canada, Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Tunisia, although it was unclear how he knew for sure.
The debate over how the Algerians handled one of the worst hostage-taking episodes in recent memory reflects conflicting ideas over how to manage such mass abductions in an age of suicidal terrorist acts in a post-9/11 world. The Algerians — and some Western supporters — argue that the loss of innocent lives is unavoidable when confronting fanatics who will kill their captives anyway, while others say modern technology provides some means of minimizing the deaths.
Algerian officials have been saying that few if any of the attackers are believed to have been Algerian. But the prime minister said the leader of the militant band that seized the gas field facility, an Algerian whom he identified as Bencheneb Mohamed Amine, was among the attackers killed during the crisis.
At a news conference in Algiers, the prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, portrayed the military’s deadly assaults on the Islamist militants who had stormed and occupied an internationally run gas-producing complex last Wednesday in remote eastern Algeria as a matter of national character and pride.
The United States had already confirmed the death of one American hostage, but on Monday the State Department announced that two additional Americans died during the siege, bringing the total to three. Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, identified them as Victor Lynn Lovelady and Gordon Lee Rowan, without specifying their hometowns. On Friday, the State Department said that Frederick Buttacio of Katy, Texas, had died.
“The whole world has understood that the reaction was courageous,” Mr. Sellal said, calling the abductions an attack “on the stability of Algeria.”
Ms. Nuland also said seven Americans had survived the crisis, but she did not identify them.
“Algerians are not people who sell themselves out,” he said. “When the security of the country is at stake, there is no possible discussion.”
The Algerian prime minister, Mr. Sellal, asserted that the attackers had started out in northern Mali — a claim made by the attackers themselves but initially dismissed by the Algerian authorities as far-fetched because the Malian border is hundreds of miles away.
It was the Algerian government’s first detailed public explanation of its actions during the siege, a brazen militant assault that has raised broad new concerns about the strength of extremists who have carved out enclaves in neighboring Mali and elsewhere in North Africa.
The prime minister added that the attackers had ultimately crossed into Algeria through its eastern border with Libya, which is much closer to the refining site. If true, it would serve as a powerful reminder of Libya’s instability since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi more than a year ago, and of the enormous distances that complicate the policing of national boundaries in the vast Sahara.
Mr. Sellal said that the 37 foreign workers killed during the episode — a toll much higher than the 23 previously estimated — came from eight countries and that five remained unaccounted for. It was unclear how many died at the hands of the kidnappers or the Algerian Army. The United States said that three Americans were among the dead and that seven had survived.
“We would need two NATOs to monitor our borders,” Mr. Sellal said.
The prime minister also said that 29 kidnappers had been killed, including the leader, and that three had been captured alive. The militants were from Egypt, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Tunisia and Canada, he said — an assertion the Canadian government said it was investigating. Mr. Sellal said the group began the plot in Mali and entered Algeria through Libya, close to the site.
He corroborated assertions made by other Algerian officials and accounts from freed hostages that the militants had intended to destroy the gas complex, had planted booby-traps throughout the site and had attached explosives to some of their captives.
Other countries, notably Japan and Britain, have raised concerns about what they considered Algeria’s harsh and hasty response. The United States has not publicly criticized Algeria, which it regards as an ally in the fight to contain jihadist groups in Africa. But law enforcement and military officials said Monday that they almost certainly would have handled such a crisis differently.
Algerian officials have said that the militants demanded an end to France’s armed intervention in Mali, and the prime minister said they sought the release of prisoners in Algeria. The Algerian government said from the outset that it would not negotiate.
First, the United States would have engaged in longer discussions with the captors to identify the leaders and buy time, the officials said. In the meantime, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and possibly allied security services could have moved surveillance drones, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and electronic eavesdropping equipment into place to help identify the locations of the hostages and the assailants.
“They went wild with their demands,” the prime minister said in his remarks. “It was impossible to meet, and it caused the military to intervene.”
“It would have been a precision approach as opposed to a sledgehammer approach,” said Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, a retired deputy commander of the United States military’s Special Operations Command.
In all, the prime minister said, 790 workers were on the site, including 134 foreigners of 26 nationalities, when it was first seized by a heavily armed militant band. It was one of the most brazen assaults in years.
A senior American official said the Algerians had allowed an unarmed American surveillance drone to fly over the gas field on Thursday. But it was unclear what role, if any, it had played in the Algerian Army’s assault that day. American officials said they had not been told of the strike in advance.
The prime minister’s news conference represented the most detailed Algerian tally of casualties in the days of alternating standoff and confrontation that began early on Wednesday as the raiders swept in from the desert to take over the internationally managed gas plant, hundreds of miles from Algiers.
Prime Minister Sellal conceded no mistakes as he provided the government’s first distinct timeline in the sequence of events, breaking it down into three episodes.
Earlier on Monday, the Philippine Foreign Affairs Department announced casualties among its citizens for the first time, saying six Filipino hostages had been killed and four were still missing.
First, the militants attacked a guarded bus carrying foreign plant workers to the airport at In Amenas, and two people aboard were killed. “They wanted to take control of this bus and take the foreign workers directly to northern Mali so they could have hostages, to negotiate with foreign countries,” he said. “But when they opened fire on the bus, there was a strong response from the gendarmes guarding it.”
Additionally, citing an unidentified government source, Reuters said Algeria had informed Japan that nine of its citizens had died — if corroborated, the highest death toll by a nation reported so far — while previous Japanese accounts had spoken of 10 unaccounted for. Officials in Tokyo declined to confirm those figures, but news reports quoted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as saying that seven Japanese captives died and that three were still unaccounted for.
Failing to capture the bus, the militants split into two groups, the prime minister said — one to seize the complex’s living quarters, the other to capture the gas plant itself, a maze of pipes and machinery. They invaded both sections, taking dozens of hostages, attaching bombs to some and booby-trapping the plant.
Japan’s NHK television interviewed an unidentified Algerian worker who escaped the gas plant. He said that not long after sporadic firing started, militants appeared, armed with machine guns, antitank rockets and antiaircraft missiles. He said the attackers were kind to Algerian staff members, who were given food and blankets. Their targets were the foreign workers, who were rounded up.
At this point, he said, the facility was ringed by security forces.
The first ones he saw killed were two Japanese and a Filipino, gunned down before his eyes. He said the militants made the foreign hostages wear bombs strapped onto their bodies. He fled during the army attack, and did not know if those foreigners had survived.
Perhaps late Wednesday or early Thursday morning — Mr. Sellal described it as a nighttime episode — the kidnappers attempted a breakout. “They put explosives on the hostages. They wanted to put the hostages in four-wheel-drive vehicles and take them to Mali.”
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 refining site, where hundreds of Algerian and scores of expatriate workers were employed.
Mr. Sellal then suggested that government helicopters immobilized the kidnappers. Witnesses have described an intense army assault, resulting in both militant and hostage deaths.
The victims were killed after hours of harrowing captivity. 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.
“A great number of workers were put in the cars; they wanted to use them as human shields,” the prime minister said. “There was a strong response from the army, and three cars exploded,” he said. One contained an Algerian militant that the prime minister identified as the leader, Mohamed-Lamine Bouchneb.
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron 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 second and final operation happened Saturday, Mr. Sellal said, when the 11 remaining kidnappers moved into the gas-producing part of the complex, a hazardous area that he said they had already tried to ignite.
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 official in Algiers, the capital, said they were in the dark themselves about some aspects of the events.
“The aim of the terrorists was to explode the gas compound,” he said. In this second assault, he said, there were “a great number of hostages,” and the kidnappers were ordered to kill them all. It was then, he said, that army snipers killed the kidnappers.
Up until Monday, official declarations from the Algerian authorities had been sparse. The country’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has hardly spoken about the crisis, even as foreign leaders have demanded details.
None of the Algerian reporters questioned the prime minister’s version of events, and some spoke of a disconnect between foreign complaints at how Algeria had managed the crisis and Algeria’s protracted struggle with Islamic militancy over the past three decades.
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.
“The terrorists came with a precise plan: Kidnap foreigners and destroy the gas plant,” said Hamid Guemache, a journalist at TSA-Tout sur l’Algérie, an online news site, dismissing criticism of the government. “Did it really have a choice? If the assault hadn’t been undertaken quickly, maybe the terrorists would have succeeded in killing all the hostages, and blowing up the factory.”
The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in a radio interview on Sunday that he was “shocked” that Algeria had been criticized for its response to terrorists who “pillage, rape and ransack.” He said that “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.
Some American counterterrorism officials conceded that point.
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 warlord with overall command of the group that apparently staged the gas-field attack, is himself a veteran of that war.
“If the terrorists were shooting hostages or at least putting explosives around their necks and their intent was to sabotage the plant, this might have been a suicide mission to blow up the plant, and not negotiate,” said Henry A. Crumpton, a career C.I.A. officer and formerly the State Department’s top counterterrorism official.
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 In Amenas.
“It sounds horrible to say, but given the number of hostages and scope of this, this is not as bad an outcome of what could have happened, if that was their intent.”
The scale of the operation, which supplies about 5 percent of Algeria’s gas output, and its location in the Sahara 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.
In all, 790 workers were on the site, including 134 foreigners of 26 nationalities, when it was first seized, the prime minister said.
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.
From the start of the siege, the Algerians were bound to respond with force, said Mansouria Mokhefi, a professor who heads the Middle East and Maghreb program at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. The question, she said, was how bloody the outcome would be.
“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.
“Everyone knows the Algerians do not negotiate,” she said, and surely the attackers knew this as well.
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.
After all, she said, the foundation of the Algerian government is its longstanding defeat of Islamist militancy and its restoration of a “certain peace” to the country after the civil war during the 1990s, when tens of thousands died.
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.
“The legitimacy of this government in Algeria is its fight against terrorism and the security of the country,” she said. “
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.
Criticizing the Algerians for their harsh tactics, as the British and Japanese have done, simply shows “a deep lack of knowledge about this regime, of its functioning.”
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.
But the French understand the Algerians, she said, and knew at the outset there would be no negotiations.
Adam
Nossiter reported from Algiers, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris, Alan Cowell and Stanley Reed from London, Floyd Whaley from Manila, Martin Fackler from Tokyo, Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon from Washington, Ian Austen from Ottawa, and Michael Schwirtz and Rick Gladstone from New York.
Indeed, French officials have publicly supported Algeria’s actions — in part because France needs to use Algerian airspace for its military intervention in Mali and wants Algeria to work harder to seal its borders with Mali.
“There isn’t a military unit that would have done better, given the strategic conditions, the place where this unfolded, the number of assailants and the number of hostages,” said Christian Prouteau, chief of security under former President François Mitterrand. “I challenge any Western country confronting this kind of operation to do better.”
Adam Nossiter reported from Algiers, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Hadjer Guenanfa from Algiers, Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris, Alan Cowell from London, and Rick Gladstone from New York.
