Local people in the north-east of Mali said on Wednesday that they had ”established contact” with the kidnappers of a group of Europeans seized in the Algerian Sahara in February and March.
”We sent them a message [on Monday] on Algerian territory and they sent us a formal reply,” said a leading figure in the remote town of Kidal, 1 500km from Bamako, and not far from the Algerian border.
He refused to give further details for security reasons.
On Tuesday it was reported that a German woman, one of 15 European tourists being held by a radical Islamist group after being seized in the spring, had died.
”In their message the kidnappers said that the hostages were alive but that it was becoming increasingly difficult to feed them,” another prominent local figure said.
A Malian official, requesting anonymity, said that he had received ”all sorts on information about the whereabouts of the hostages” in Mali.
In its Wednesday edition a private Malian magazine L’Independant claimed the hostages were on Malian soil and said a video-cassette had been sent to the authorities in Bamako. An official source said ”it could not confirm this report for the moment. But, it added, ”bounty-hunters eager to sell information are among the many ‘witnesses”’.
A total of 32 Europeans tourists disappeared earlier this year while trekking in the Sahara without guides. Seventeen were freed in an army raid in May while the others were held on the remote plain of Tamelrik in the south-east of Algeria.
If confirmed, the death of the German woman leaves nine Germans, four Swiss and one Dutchman still in the hands of the abductors, believed to be the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a radical Islamic extremist group with reported links to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. – Sapa-AFP