Norway’s Statoil, which jointly operates the In Amenas site with Britain’s BP and Sonatrach of Algeria, said two Norwegians have been found alive but six others remain unaccounted for.
In Tokyo, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered his government to do everything possible to ensure the safety of those Japanese unaccounted for in “an extremely despicable” incident that “can never be forgiven.”
France, which said on Saturday that 2,000 of the 2,500 troops it had pledged were now on the ground in Mali, said on Saturday that no more of its citizens were being held.
Of the French intervention in Mali, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said at a meeting in Abidjan on Saturday that “France was obliged to intervene very, very rapidly, otherwise there would have been no more Mali.”
Algerian news agency APS quoted a government official as saying the kidnappers, who claimed to have come from Niger, were armed with machineguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers and missiles.
This was confirmed by an Algerian driver, Iba El Haza, who said the hostage-takers spoke in different Arabic dialects and perhaps also in English.
“From their accents I understood one was Egyptian, one Tunisian, another Algerian and one was speaking English or (another) foreign language,” Haza told AFP, two days after escaping during the army’s Thursday attack.
“The terrorists said: ‘You have nothing to do with this, you are Algerians and Muslims. We won’t keep you, we only want the foreigners.’”
Algeria’s El Watan daily quoted a former military officer as justifying the army’s assault on Thursday, saying: “All hesitation is forbidden when the future of the nation is at stake or being threatened.”
The final death tolls, of both foreign and Algerian hostages and of gunmen, was not yet known.
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