Algeria’s prime minister accused a Canadian of co-ordinating last week’s raid on a desert gas plant and, praising the storming of the complex where 38 mostly foreign hostages were killed, he pledged to resist the rise of Islamists in the Sahara.
Algeria will never succumb to terrorism or allow al-Qaeda to establish “Sahelistan”, an Afghan-style power base in arid northwest Africa, Abdelmalek Sellal told a news conference in Algiers where he also said at least 37 foreign hostages died.
“There is clear political will,” the prime minister said.
Claimed by an Algerian al-Qaeda leader as a riposte to France’s attack on his allies in neighbouring Mali the previous week, the four-day siege drew global attention to Islamists in the Sahara and Sahel regions and brought promises of support to African governments from Western powers whose toppling of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi helped flood the region with weapons.
The attack on a valuable part of its vital energy industry raised questions about the security capacity of an establishment that took power from French colonists 50 years ago, held off a bloody Islamist insurgency in the 1990s and has avoided the democratic upheavals the Arab Spring brought to North Africa.
Sellal said a Canadian citizen whom he named only as Chedad, a surname found among Arabs in the region, was among 29 gunmen killed and added that he had “co-ordinated” the attack. Another three militants were taken alive and were in custody.