Anis Belghoul/Associated Press
Algerian Army vehicles on Sunday near a remote town in southeastern Algeria where hostages were taken in a four-day ordeal.
ALGIERS — In his first official tally of the deadly scope of the Algerian hostage crisis, Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said Monday that the known death toll among the foreign captives had risen steeply to 37 from 23, and that five additional foreigners remained unaccounted for.
In a televised news conference, Mr. Sellal also said that 29 militants were killed and that three were captured alive during the four-day ordeal that terrorized a remote Algerian gas field refining site. Two of the attackers were Canadian, he contended.
Algerian officials had been forecasting that the tally of foreign dead would rise from a preliminary estimate of 23, a concern that was reinforced by reports that a significant number of hostages from Japan and the Philippines had been killed at the site. On Monday, the Algerian prime minister said the dead came from eight different nations, without specifying which ones. He also said that one Algerian hostage had been killed as well.
Mr. Sellal was more specific about the attackers, saying at the news conference that they had come from Egypt, Canada, Mali, Niger, Mauritania and Tunisia, although it was unclear how he knew for sure. Algerian officials have been saying that few if any of the attackers are believed to have been Algerian.
The prime minister asserted that the attackers had started out in northern Mali — a claim made by the attackers themselves, which had initially been dismissed by the Algerian authorities as far-fetched because the Malian border is hundreds of miles away.
But the prime minister added that the attackers had ultimately crossed into Algeria through its eastern border with Libya, which is much closer to the refining site. If true, it would serve as a powerful a reminder of Libya’s instability since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi more than a year ago, and of the enormous distances that complicate the monitoring of national boundaries in the vast Sahara.
“We would need two NATOs to monitor our borders,” Mr. Sellal said.
He corroborated assertions made by other Algerian officials and accounts from freed hostages that the militants had intended to destroy the gas complex and had booby-trapped some hostages with explosives.
In all, the prime minister said, 790 workers were on the site, including 134 foreigners of 26 nationalities, when it was first seized by a heavily armed militant band in one of the most brazen assaults in years.
The prime minister’s news conference represented the most detailed Algerian tally of casualties in the days of alternating standoff and confrontation that began early on Wednesday as the raiders swept in from the desert to take over the internationally managed gas plant, hundreds of miles from Algiers.
Earlier Monday, the Philippine Foreign Affairs Department announced casualties among its citizens for the first time, saying six Filipino hostages had been killed and four were still missing.
Additionally, citing an unidentified government source, Reuters said Algeria had informed Japan that nine of its citizens had died — if corroborated, the highest death toll by a nation reported so far — while previous Japanese accounts had spoken of 10 unaccounted for. Officials in Tokyo declined to confirm those figures, but news reports quoted Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as saying that seven Japanese captives died and that three were still unaccounted for.
Japan’s NHK television interviewed an unidentified Algerian worker who escaped the gas plant. He said that not long after sporadic firing started, militants appeared, armed with machine guns, antitank rockets and antiaircraft missiles. He said the attackers were kind to Algerian staff members, who were given food and blankets. Their targets were the foreign workers, who were rounded up.
The first ones he saw killed were two Japanese and a Filipino, gunned down before his eyes. He said the militants made the foreign hostages wear bombs strapped onto their bodies. He fled during the army attack, and did not know if those foreigners had survived.
The standoff between several dozen radical Islamists and Algerian security services came to a bloody conclusion on Saturday when the Algerians assaulted the kidnappers’ last redoubt at the refining site, where hundreds of Algerian and scores of expatriate workers were employed.
The victims — from the United States, Britain, France, Japan and other countries — were killed after hours of harrowing captivity. An unknown number of the hostages died in the assault on Saturday; Algerian officials said they also killed most of the remaining hostage takers, who they said were followers of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a warlord linked to Al Qaeda based in northern Mali. A regional Web site reported that he had issued a video claiming responsibility for the attack.
Algerian Prime Minister Says at Least 37 Foreigners Dead in Siege
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Algerian Prime Minister Says at Least 37 Foreigners Dead in Siege
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Algerian Prime Minister Says at Least 37 Foreigners Dead in Siege
