MANILA, Jan 24, (Agencies): A seventh worker from the Philippines has been confirmed killed in last week’s siege by Islamic militants of a remote natural gas plant in Algeria, the foreign department in Manila said Thursday.

The remains were identified by his British employers, foreign affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez told a news conference.

Manila on Monday said six Filipinos were killed and 12 survived the 72-hour hostage drama in the north African desert.

“Most of them died of gunshot wounds and the effects of explosions,” Hernandez said, without naming the Filipino fatalities.

Two other Filipinos remain missing while four more are in an Algerian hospital recovering from injuries sustained either during the raid or their subsequent rescue by Algerian security forces, Hernandez said.
Algeria has said 37 foreigners of eight different nationalities and an Algerian were killed in the four-day siege, which ended on Saturday in a rescue operation by security forces who captured three of the assailants.

Japan’s government Thursday confirmed a tenth victim of the Algerian hostage crisis, the highest death toll of any nation, as friends and colleagues of those who perished paid tribute at a makeshift altar.
The announcement came as the seven Japanese men who survived headed home aboard a government plane that was also carrying the bodies of nine victims.

Confirmed
“We have now identified the final body,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters. “We have confirmed the death of a total ten people.”

“The government for its part wishes to express its heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families,” said Suga.

Japan’s body count of 10 is the highest of any nation whose citizens were caught up in the crisis in the Sahara and an unusual taste of Jihadist anger for a country that has remained far from US-led wars in the Muslim world.

At the headquarters of plant-builder JGC, which employed — directly or indirectly — all Japanese at the complex, mourners dressed in black solemnly bowed to a Buddhist cenotaph, urging departed souls to find peace.

An elegantly handwritten prayer for those who lost their lives was inscribed on the wooden tablet, around which lay bouquets of white flowers.

The loss of so many colleagues is a heavy blow to JGC in a country where corporate communities are close-knit and company loyalties remain strong.

Media reported Thursday that the tenth Japanese victim of the Islamist gunmen’s rampage was Tadanori Aratani, 66, a former vice president of JGC and lately its supreme adviser.

The government has so far refused to identify those who died, although newspapers and broadcasters have told the stories of some victims, including heart-wrenching tales of never-to-be-realised plans for family celebrations.

Islamist commandos behind the spectacular hostage-taking at an Algerian gas field probably had help from someone inside the plant, Norway’s foreign minister said in a newspaper interview published Thursday.

“We have reports that the terrorists had people on the inside who laid the groundwork over time,” Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide told the Verdens Gang (VG).

“They had for example pre-positioned equipment at the site,” he added.

A foreign ministry spokeswoman confirmed Eide’s comments to AFP.

Citing other unidentified sources, VG said the Islamist militants had placed weapons inside the complex ahead of their January 16 attack, when they took hundreds of people hostage until a raid by Algerian security forces brought a bloody end to the crisis on Saturday.

At least 37 foreign hostages were killed, including Western and Asian nationals, according to a preliminary death toll, as well as one Algerian hostage. Several people are still missing and some bodies have not yet been identified.

The newspaper also cited hostage witness accounts as saying that the attackers knew exactly where to find the expatriate workers inside the vast complex.

An Algerian security official told AFP on Wednesday that one of the assailants had been employed as a chauffeur at the site up until last year.

Five Norwegians remain unaccounted for. They are employees of the Norwegian oil group Statoil, which jointly operates the site with BP and state-run Algerian energy firm Sonatrach.

The Scandinavian country has sent a forensics team to try to find the Norwegians among the unidentified bodies.

Report
Libya’s former rebels from the town of Zintan on Thursday denied an Algiers newspaper report of having sold arms to Islamists who seized an Algerian gas plant last week.

“We deny the information published by the Algerian newspaper Echorouk accusing Zintan revolutionaries of having sold weapons used by terrorists” at the In Amenas plant, said the military council of Zintan, southwest of Tripoli.

The “security of sister Algeria is inseparable from the security of Libya,” it said in a statement on the Internet, condemning “the terrorist attack that targeted the interests and security of the Algerian people.”
Fighters from Zintan who fought the forces of Moamer Kadhafi in 2011 were among the first rebel groups to enter Tripoli in August of that year and seized a large military arsenal abandoned by troops of the former dictator.

Algerian daily reported Wednesday that “the first interrogations of the three terrorists captured by security services have revealed that rebels in Zintan were behind the sale of the arms used against the gas plant.”

Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said last week after the siege ended in a bloodbath that three attackers had been captured during the operation launched by Algerian special forces against the Islamists.

Echorouk said the head of the hostage-takers, Algerian Islamist Mohamed Lamine Bencheneb, killed in the firefight, had negotiated with Libyan rebels the purchase of Kalashnikov assault rifles at $600 each and rockets for $800.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that revolts in Syria and Libya had unleashed instability in the Middle East and Africa that had exacted a “tragic toll” in last week’s militant attack on a gas plant in Algeria.

Putin and other Russian officials have said the United States and its NATO allies have sacrificed stability to their political ambitions in the Middle East and North Africa, often playing into the hands of radical Islamists.

Algerian militant leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar said his forces seized the In Amenas gas plant in the name in retaliation for France’s offensive against his allies in neighbouring Mali. At least 38 workers were killed as Algerian troops stormed the remote gas complex.

While Russia backed a UN Security Council resolution in December authorising intervention to stop Mali falling to al Qaeda, it has blocked three resolutions on Syria and accused the West of over-stepping the mandate of a UN resolution on Libya that its abstention allowed to pass.

“The Syrian conflict has been raging for almost two years now. Upheaval in Libya, accompanied by the uncontrolled spread of weapons, contributed to the deterioration of the situation in Mali,” Putin said.
Algerian political parties called for a halt to French overflights of the North African state and an end to France’s military intervention in Mali, in a statement received by AFP on Thursday.

The parties, including the Movement for the Society of Peace (MSP), an Islamist group, urged “the closure of Algerian airspace to French and non-French military planes,” following a meeting in Algiers on Wednesday.

The MSP is part of an alliance which won only 47 seats out of 462 in May 2012 parliamentary elections.
“Overflights of Algeria by French planes were authorised on the basis of false arguments which damage national sovereignty and place Algeria as a partner in this war” in Mali, the parties said.

They called for France to halt its military intervention in the region and “to withdraw immediately from Mali.”

At the same time, the parties condemned “the criminal terrorist operation targeting the innocent among Algerian and foreign workers” at the besieged In Amenas gas plant in the Sahara last week.

Islamist militants took hostages at the plant, prompting a bloody rescue operation by Algerian security forces, claiming their attack was in protest at Algeria’s complicity in France’s military campaign against Islamists in Mali.

Algiers has said 37 foreigners and an Algerian were killed in the four-day siege which ended on Saturday.

Accounts
As wildly contradictory accounts trickled out about a terror attack at an Algerian gas plant, one source of information proved to be the most reliable: announcements by the al-Qaeda-linked militants themselves.
The hostage-takers phoned in regularly with up-to-the-minute reports, offered eerily accurate numbers of hostages taken and killed, and clearly laid out their goals.
All this came via a Mauritanian news website that — apart from receiving calls from radical Islamists and al-Qaeda-linked militants — is known for its reliability on more mundane local news.
Algeria’s official information, in contrast, was silent and murky. At one point the state news service even went dark online before returning with a home page scrubbed of all mention of the hostage crisis that had riveted the world.

When Algerian officials were willing to comment — only anonymously — their information drastically underplayed the scope of the hostage siege that left at least 37 captives and 29 militants dead and sent scores of foreign energy workers fleeing across the desert for their lives.
The reliability of the information from the kidnappers was a departure from the more bombastic and exaggerated announcements typical of al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts.

Also, instead of publishing statements on a password-protected jihadi website entirely in Arabic, the Masked Brigade that claimed responsibility for the gas plant attack sent its information to a news website published in both French and Arabic, reaching a much wider audience.

“It was in the interests of the gunmen to get their story out and the Algerians didn’t perceive it was in their interest to get the story out in real time,” said William Lawrence, the North Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group. “The gunmen needed to negotiate through the media, politicize the Mali conflict through the media, and score jihadist points in the media.”

The editor of the Mauritanian site, the Nouakchott Information Agency, also known as ANI, attributed the difference in style to the Masked Brigade’s founder, Moktar Belmoktar.

“Moktar is a man who speaks frankly of what he wants, he’s straight forward,” said El Mokhtar Ould Sidi, who added that his site left out the parts of the kidnappers’ statements that he deemed to be propaganda. “It’s very different from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or al-Qaeda central.”

Figuring out what was happening during North Africa’s most audacious terror attack was no easy matter with the Ain Amenas natural gas complex deep in the Sahara desert, more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from the capital, Algiers.

Despite a vibrant local newspaper scene, Algeria is not an easy place for foreign journalists to operate and information about security matters is kept under tight control by the military-dominated government.
Instead, as the four-day standoff unfolded, it was the regular dispatches from the militants carried by the Nouakchott agency that provided the most consistent source of information. The reports also bolstered the militants’ assertions that the Algerian forces had endangered the hostages with their tactics.
No matter how shocking the news was, it seemed to come first and most reliably from the militants.
Soon after the attack began Jan. 16, the militants claimed to have seized 41 hostages. That night, Algerian Interior Minister Dahu Kabila maintained there were only 20 hostages and they were being held by a local terror group.

The militants replied by listing their diverse nationalities, including the presence of Canadians — something only confirmed by the government several days later.

The biggest revelations came on the second day of the standoff when frantic messages from the militants described Algerian helicopters shooting at the complex’s living quarters, followed by a full-scale attack on a convoy of vehicles carrying hostages.

Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci at the time denied there had been any such airstrike, and all that was reported that day was that the army had foiled an escape attempt.

The ANI, meanwhile, said 35 hostages and 11 fighters were killed, with only seven hostages left alive — a death toll it took Algerian authorities several days to match. In the end, their final numbers were quite close.

The accounts of two hostages who barely escaped the doomed convoy, Irish electrician Stephen McFaul and Filipino civil engineer Ruben Andrada, ended up corroborating the militants’ version of events.
While the Algerian government claimed the kidnappers were trying to escape with their hostages, the militants were trying to take the captives from the complex’s living quarters to the more defensible gas works on the other side when the helicopters attacked.