BREAKING NEWS Saturday, January 19, 2013 3:33 PM EST
Siege of Algerian Gas Field Comes to a Bloody End
The hostage crisis in the Algerian desert reached a bloody conclusion Saturday as the army carried out a final assault on the gas field taken over by Islamist militants, killing 11 of them, but only after the militants had killed seven hostages, the official Algerian news agency reported.
French, British and American officials said the Algerian government had told them the military operation was over, but a senior Algerian government official said security forces were “doing cleanup” to make sure no kidnappers were hiding in the sprawling industrial complex.
In keeping with the Algerian government’s relative silence throughout the crisis, there were few details Saturday about how the final act unfolded.
But the provisional death toll, even by the government’s reckoning, was heavy. Out of dozens taken hostage on a sprawling site that employed hundreds of workers, 23 were dead while 32 kidnappers were killed, according to the government news service.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/world/africa/algeria-militants-hostages.html?emc=na
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