"Some Hostages Killed, but Raid Rescues Many, Algeria Says" NY Times

"Kidnappers and at least some of their hostages were killed on Thursday as Algerian forces raided a gas facility where a heavily armed group of Islamist extremists was holding dozens of captives, including Americans and other foreigners, the Algerian government announced."  NY Times

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This reminds me of the Egyptian "rescue" operation on Malta many years ago in which most of the hostages were killed.  I have a bad expectation in this.  For these 3rd world country the exercize of national sovereignty is more important than the lives of foreign hostages.

People should remember that when they take high paying jobs in such countries.  pl

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/world/africa/algeria-militants-hostages.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

Comments

[b]

At least the last three hostage rescue operations the French ran have failed. The U.S. is also not always successful in its rescue attempts. The Algerians at least tried and a lot of the hostages seem to have been freed.

Algeria sits on a LOT of oil and gas. It is certainly reasonably paranoid about some outsider schemes to get their hands on that. It had warned against the attack on Libya and the one on Mali because it feared the blowback. As this blowback is now coming it is, in my view, justified to react to that as it sees fit.

[robt willmann]

It appears as if the hostage situation at the gas plant in Algeria is over. This looks like what some have described as the "Russian approach" to a hostage situation: crash in with guns blazing at the captors, and if the hostages get killed, well, that is just too bad for the hostages and their families.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_ALGERIA_KIDNAPPING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-01-19-09-51-18

As I left Houston yesterday (Friday) evening, I heard that one American whose family is in Katy, on the edge of Houston, had died; there was speculation that he had died of a heart attack at the time of Algeria's first assault on the plant.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/01/19/katy-resident-reported-dead-in-algeria/

Another Houston-area hostage was there and still alive as of yesterday evening, but apparently not anymore as the second Algerian assault today resulted in his and the remaining hostages' deaths.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/01/18/houston-man-possibly-among-algeria-hostages-kprc-says/

Another issue in the scorched earth approach to a hostage situation is that there are no captors left alive to interrogate to gain new information.

[Fred]

What did all these people expect the Algerian government to do, pay ransom? There have been travel warnings in place regarding Algeria for some time. Hopefully these Americans working there actually understood the risk.