Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Freed in Mali, hostages back home
Frenchwoman, 2 Italians safely return; Swiss captive killed
PARIS — Sophie Petronin, a 75-year-old French aid worker held hostage for four years by Islamic extremists in Mali, was reunited Friday with her grandchildren in France, as relatives also welcomed home two Italians and a Malian politician freed with her this week.
Relatives enveloped Petronin in a huge embrace after she descended from the plane at the Villacoublay military airport southwest of Paris, where she was greeted by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Petronin met with Macron for about an hour at the airport. They did not speak to the press.
However, Petronin brought somber news about one of about five other hostages still being held.
Switzerland’s Foreign Ministry said Friday that a Swiss woman who was held hostage in Mali had been killed. The ministry said it was informed by French authorities that the hostage, whose name wasn’t published, had been “killed by kidnappers of the Islamist terrorist organization Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam Muslimeen about a month ago.”
The group is Mali’s branch of al-Qaida.
Switzerland’s foreign minister condemned the killing of the hostage, whose release his country had quietly been trying to negotiate since she was kidnapped four years ago.
“It was with great sadness that I learned of the death of our fellow citizen,” Ignazio Cassis said in a statement.
“The information about the killing was obtained by the French authorities from the recently released French hostage,” the ministry said.
Cassis said the exact circumstances of the killing of the Swiss hostage are currently still unclear. Swiss media outlets reported that the woman was a Christian missionary from the northwestern city of Basel.
Petronin was released with the two Italians and the prominent Malian politician days after the Malian government released nearly 200 Islamic militants in an apparent prisoner exchange that some now fear could further destabilize the volatile country.
The Rev. Pierluigi Maccalli and Nicola Chiacchio arrived at Rome’s Ciampino airport on Friday afternoon aboard an Italian government jet, welcomed by Premier Giuseppe Conte and Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio. Wearing masks over their beards and dressed in sweatsuits, the two men greeted the officials on the tarmac and then proceeded into an airport VIP lounge.
Soumaila Cisse, a three-time presidential candidate in Mali, recounted months of arduous conditions before a precarious trip to their extraction point, arriving in Mali’s capital 48 hours after first being released in the country’s remote north.
There was no immediate information about at least four other foreign hostages that the Islamic militants are believed to still hold. It also was not known whether a ransom was paid, though extremist groups have long funded their operations with such payments from European governments.
Cisse, who had been kidnapped earlier this year while campaigning for reelection as a legislator, told Mali’s state broadcaster ORTM that after months of captivity things began to move quickly at the end of September.
“I spent six months in … very difficult living conditions, in almost permanent isolation, but I must confess that I was not subjected to any violence, neither physical nor verbal,” Cisse told ORTM.
The Italian hostages included Maccalli, a Roman Catholic missionary priest.
Among those missing is Colombian nun Gloria Cecilia Narvaez Argoti, last seen in a 2018 video alongside Petronin.