French troops raid Niger to end hostage seizure
Jihadists threaten new attacks
NIAMEY: French special forces and local troops raided an army base yesterday in northern Niger, ending a hostage seizure by Islamist fighters who had staged twin suicide bombings that killed at least 20 people.
The dawn raid came after Signatories in Blood, a jihadist group that claimed Thursday’s blasts, threatened to continue attacking Niger until the country withdraws its forces from neighboring Mali, where they are part of a French-led military campaign against Al-Qaeda-linked Islamists.
A French defense ministry official said two “terrorists” had been killed in the raid on a building at the Agadez army base, where Islamist fighters had holed up after the bombings and were holding a group of trainee soldiers hostage.
An elected official in Agadez, the main city in Niger’s mostly desert north, gave a higher toll, saying three “terrorists” and three hostages had been killed, as well as a civilian caught in the cross-fire. Niger’s government did not confirm those numbers, while the French official said the toll was preliminary. Nigerien authorities would not say how many hostages had been taken.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed France had taken part in the raid. “The situation has stabilized as we speak, especially in Agadez, where our special forces intervened to back the Niger forces,” he said on France’s BFMTV. Signatories in Blood, founded by veteran Algerian jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, first grabbed worldwide attention in January when it seized an Algerian gas plant in a brazen attack that left 38 hostages dead.
Belmokhtar had been reported dead in April by Chad’s President Idriss Deby Itno, who said the one-eyed extremist had been killed in fighting with Chadian troops in northeastern Mali. But Belmokhtar’s group said he had personally overseen the Niger attacks. “It was Belmokhtar himself who supervised the operational plans,” spokesman El-Hassen Ould Khalil was quoted as saying by a Mauritanian news agency. The group also warned of “further operations” in Niger and threatened France and other countries involved in what it called the “Crusader campaign” in Mali.
It said the attacks were its “first response” and threatened to “bring the fight to the interior of his country unless (Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou) withdraws his mercenary army” from Mali. Thursday’s attacks at the Agadez army base and a uranium mine majority-owned by French nuclear group Areva killed 18 soldiers, two civilians and four attackers in all, officials said.