01/17/2013 15:55 GMT
ALGIERS, Jan 17, 2013 (AFP) - The hostage crisis at the In Amenas gas field has dragged Algeria into the Mali conflict despite its opposition to military intervention, with the kidnapping of foreigners coming on the heels of its decision to give logistical support to France.
The Algerian authorities for a long time insisted on a political solution to the turmoil in Mali, but finally allowed overflights by French fighter planes to support a ground offensive aimed at ousting Islamists in the country's north.
The deadly dawn attack on Wednesday, in which Al-Qaeda-linked Islamists seized dozens of foreigners, many of them Western, took place at a major gas plant in southeastern Algeria operated by British oil giant BP, Norway's Statoil and Algeria's Sonatrach.
The Algerian army launched a rescue operation at the gas complex on Thursday, with a spokesman for the kidnappers saying 34 hostages, some of them Westerners, and 15 Islamists, including their chief Abu al-Baraa, were killed in an air strike.
The APS news agency reported that the Algerian army freed four hostages, including two Britons, a Frenchman and a Kenyan, and 600 Algerians who were being held at the gas plant.
The operation at the plant was ongoing by evening.
Chafik Mesbah, a former officer in the Algerian army, said in an interview with local daily Echorouk that the kidnapping was a "warning" not just to Western countries, "but also to Algeria, which opened its airspace to French army planes."
"It is a heavy blow for Algeria... The goal could be to draw it into the war that France is waging in Mali," said the French-language daily Liberty.
"It could be signalling the start of reprisals against Algeria, after the authorisation of flights over its territory by French Rafale fighter-jets and the setting in motion of the military operation in northern Mali," it added.
The gunmen say the attack is in retaliation for Algeria's support for French airstrikes and for its tough line on jihadists, calling for the release of radical Islamists being held in neighbouring Mali.
"This operation is a strong political message to Algeria regarding its intransigent stances towards the jihadists, and a message to other neighbouring countries," one of the kidnappers, identified as Abu al-Baraa, early Thursday told Al-Jazeera satellite channel.
"Our detainees for theirs," he said, adding that his group has "contacted our leadership in Mali."
"We demand the Algerian army pull out from the area to allow negotiations to begin," Abu al-Baraa told the Doha-based satellite channel, speaking with a strong Algerian accent.
Abu al-Baraa was later reported killed in the air strike.
Algerian Interior Minister Dahou Ould Kablia had insisted Wednesday that Algiers would not negotiate with the "terrorists".
A group calling itself the "Signatories for Blood" claimed responsibility for the kidnapping in a statement published by Mauritanian website Alakhbar.
The group is led by veteran Islamist fighter Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a former leader of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, who was ejected from the group last year and who has been blamed for previous abductions and killings of both Algerians and foreigners.
"Algeria was chosen for this operation to teach (President Abdelaziz) Bouteflika that we will never accept the humiliation of the Algerian people's honour... by opening Algerian airspace to French planes," the group said.
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