Pinoys among hostages in Algeria

PARIS – Malaysians and Filipinos are among the hostages being held at a gas field in Algeria, French news channel France 24 reported Wednesday on the basis of what they said was a phone conversation with a Frenchman also being held.

The station, which only broadcast a short excerpt of the conversation they recorded with the French hostage, said he had told them that he was being held along with English, Japanese, Filipino and Malaysian nationals.

This developed as 15 foreigners and 30 Algerians held hostage by Islamist extremists managed to escape from their kidnappers, local media reported, citing officials.

“Fifteen foreigners, including a French couple, have escaped from their captors,” the private Ennahar television channel reported, with the station’s owner, Anis Rahmani, telling AFP that the information came from an “official source.”

The French embassy could not verify the claim, which Algerian government source also said was impossible to confirm in the current circumstances.

News 24 said it had no way of knowing if the hostage was speaking under constraint from his captors.   

According to the station, the Frenchman said the hostages were being held in a booby-trapped building at the gas field in southern Algeria and that individual hostages had belts of explosives attached to them as a deterrent against any attack from security forces.

France has not confirmed that one of its nationals is among the hostages.

Islamists told Mauritanian media they were holding 41 Westerners, among them French, British and Japanese citizens, as well as seven Americans, at the gas field in Amenas, which is jointly operated by British oil giant BP, Norway’s Statoil and state-run Algerian energy firm Sonatrach.

Algeria has said an Algerian and a Briton were killed in the attack.

Various sources had earlier indicated that the hostages include Americans, Britons, one Frenchman, an Irishman, several Japanese and Norwegians.

An Islamist group, in a statement posted on Mauritanian website Alakhbar, said the kidnapping was in retaliation for the French military intervention against armed Islamists who seized control of northern Mali in April last year.

In Manila, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) could not immediately confirm reports that Filipino nationals were among the hostages.

DFA spokesman Raul Hernandez said the DFA was awaiting a report from the Philippine embassy in Tripoli, Libya if a Filipino was among the foreign hostages seized in the oil field attack.

“Our embassy in Tripoli, which has jurisdiction over Algeria, is still verifying reports of abduction with authorities there,” Hernandez said.

Islamist extremists and three of 41 hostages they are holding at an Algerian gas field demanded Thursday, in interviews with Al-Jazeera, that the army withdraw from the site so that talks can begin, reports from Dubai said.