Algeria storms hostage site; death toll unclear

U.S. reaction — The Obama administration appeared to be in the dark Thursday about a hostage situation at a natural gas plant in Algeria, where Algerian forces launched a military assault to free dozens of foreign hostages, including an unknown number of Americans, held by Islamist militants. An administration official said the U.S. was not aware of the raid to free the hostages in advance. The administration was offering no details about how many American hostages had been taken and whether they were still in captivity or even alive.
Militant vaults to fame — His entourage calls him “the Prince," and after the militant Islamist takeover of a town in northern Mali last year, he liked to go down to the river and watch the sunset, surrounded by armed bodyguards. Others call him “Laaouar," or the One-Eyed, after he lost an eye to shrapnel; some call him “Mr. Marlboro" for the cigarette-smuggling monopoly he created across the Sahel region to finance his jihad. And French intelligence officials called him “the Uncatchable" because he escaped unharmed after apparently being involved in a series of kidnappings in 2003 that captured 32 European tourists, which is thought to have earned him millions of dollars in ransoms. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, 40, born in the Algerian desert city of Ghardaia, 350 miles south of Algiers, is now being called the mastermind of the hostage crisis at an internationally run natural-gas facility in eastern Algeria. Algerian officials say he mounted the assault on the facility and the mass abduction of foreigners; his spokesmen say the raid is a reprisal for the French military intervention in Mali and for Algeria’s quiet support for the French war against Islamist militants in the Sahel. Belmokhtar has been active in politics, moneymaking and fighting for decades in the Sahel, which includes Mali, Mauritania and Niger and is one of the poorest regions in the world. But through this single action, one of the most brazen kidnappings in years, he has suddenly become one of the best-known figures associated with the Islamist militancy sweeping the region and agitating capitals around the world.
Oil workers pulled — Taking no chances, global oil companies evacuated scores of employees from Algeria on Thursday after the attack and hostage-taking at the remote Ain Amenas natural gas field. Only a handful of companies acknowledged that they were removing personnel, but oil executives in the U.S. said foreign oil service companies were in the process of quietly removing several hundred workers until they were confident that the security situation was stable. Statoil, the Norwegian oil company that partnered with BP in the remote Ain Amenas field that was attacked by militants, said it would remove 40 nonessential employees working at three gas facilities by Thursday night. BP said it was evacuating an undisclosed number of administrative workers, and Spain’s Compania Espanola de Petroleos announced that it was removing its field workers from two Algerian facilities in the desert.
— From wire reports