Kjetil Alsvik/Statoil, via Reuters
An undated photo of the In Amenas gas field in Algeria, where Islamist militants took at least 20 foreign hostages on Wednesday.
BAMAKO, Mali — As the French military assault on Islamist extremists in Mali escalated into a potentially much broader North African conflict, a tense standoff developed on Thursday between Algerian troops and armed attackers who seized dozens of hostages, including Americans and other foreigners, at an internationally managed gas field in neighboring Algeria and permitted or forced some of them to broadcast their plight.
A French television station, France 24, quoted an unidentified hostage as saying the attackers “were heavily armed and forced several hostages to wear explosives belts. They threatened to blow up the gas field if Algerian forces attempted to enter the site,” the station reported.
The Qatar-based Al Jazeera channel also quoted a hostage identified as British as saying the hostages were “receiving care and good treatment from the kidnappers” but Algerian forces surrounding the installations were “firing at the camp.”
Both stations said it was unclear whether the people they interviewed had been speaking under duress. Al Jazeera quoted a kidnapper as demanding that the Algerian Army pull back to permit negotiations to end the crisis.
Apart from foreign hostages, said by the attackers to number 41, a large number of Algerians were also seized, but the Algerian news agency reported on Thursday that 30 of them had escaped.
Algerian officials said at least two people, including a Briton, were killed in the assault, which began with an ambush on a bus trying to ferry gas-field workers to an airport and was depicted by the attackers as reprisal for the French intervention in Mali and also to punish Algeria for allowing French warplanes to use its airspace to reach targets in northern Mali.
The British Foreign Office confirmed that a British citizen had been killed in the attack but a spokeswoman declined to give details or identify the victim. Foreign Secretary William Hague said the hostages included "a number of British nationals. This is therefore an extremely dangerous situation."
Hundreds of Algerian security forces surrounded the gas-field compound and the country’s interior minister said there would be no negotiations.
Algeria’s official news agency said at least 20 fighters had carried out the attack and mass abduction. There were unconfirmed reports late on Wednesday that the security forces had tried to storm the compound and had retreated under gunfire from the hostage takers.
Many details of the assault on the gas field in a barren desert site near Libya’s border remained murky, including the precise number of hostages. American, French, British, Japanese and Norwegian citizens who worked at the field were known to be among them, officials said.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta called the gas-field attack a terrorist act and said the United States was weighing a response. His statement suggested that the Obama administration could be drawn into a military entanglement in North Africa that it had been seeking to keep at arm’s length — even as it has conceded that the region has become a new haven for extremists who threaten Western security and vital interests.
“I want to assure the American people that the United States will take all necessary and proper steps that are required to deal with this situation,” Mr. Panetta said during a visit to Italy.
The gas-field attack, which seemed to take foreign governments and the British and Norwegian companies that help run the facility completely by surprise, appeared to make good on a pledge by the Islamist militants who seized northern Mali last year to sharply expand their struggle against the West in response to France’s military intervention that began last week.
The hostage taking broadened the conflict beyond Mali’s borders and raised the possibility of drawing an increasing number of foreign countries into direct involvement, particularly if expatriates working in the vast energy extraction industries of North Africa become targets. It also doubled, at least, the number of non-African hostages that Islamist militants in northern and western Africa have been using as bargaining chips to finance themselves in recent years through ransoms that have totaled millions of dollars.
But there was no indication that the gas-field attackers wanted money, and no other demands or ultimatums were issued. In a statement sent to ANI, a Mauritanian news agency, they demanded the “immediate halt of the aggression against our own in Mali.”
