RCMP making ‘some progress’ in probe of deadly Algerian siege

Two Mounties on the ground in Algeria are making “some progress” in their efforts to verify claims that a couple of Canadians had a role in a deadly gas plant attack in that country, a senior law enforcement official said late Friday.

The official acknowledged that Algeria is dealing with many priorities in the wake of the four-day siege last month at the In Amenas facility that left 37 hostages and 29 militants dead.

“We’re not the only country knocking on their door,” the official told Postmedia News. Not wanting to jeopardize the case, the official declined to go into detail about the challenges RCMP investigators are facing or what they’re doing to try to authenticate the claims, which were made by Algeria’s prime minister.

However, Scott Stewart, a former U.S. State Department special agent, suggested investigators could be running into any number of challenges, including fake identity documents, poorly collected evidence and badly decomposed bodies.

It could also be that the militants in the Algeria attack were not carrying any documents on them at all,

“WE’RE NOT THE ONLY COUNTRY KNOCKING ON THEIR DOOR.” LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL

which, in the remote North African Sahel desert, is a very real possibility.

Further, if the attackers’ bodies were badly damaged or decomposed, that could be making it difficult to compare fingerprints and photographs.

Investigators are also likely dealing with authorities who don’t have the most sophisticated capabilities for evidence collection, Stewart said.

Experts said Canadian intelligence officials are likely liaising with their counterparts in the U.S., Britain and France on this file in case it turns out there’s a network operating out of several countries.

At a daily briefing Friday, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that the FBI was investigating the plant attack but did not offer any new information about what agents have found.

There have been conflicting accounts about the supposed Canadian militants. The Algerian prime minister reportedly said the Canadians were of Arab descent. However, a Wall Street Journal story cited three plant employees who recalled a “bearded, blond militant” assisting the ringleader of the group. That ringleader at one point boasted of the man’s Canadian origins, one of the employees said.

An official for the Canadian federal government would only say Friday that authorities were still “trying to get any relevant information” to verify the claims of a Canadian connection.