ALGIERS, Algeria — Algerian forces scoured the Sahara Desert on Tuesday, searching for five foreign energy workers who vanished during a chaotic four-day battle with hostage taking Islamist militants.
One official says the men may have fled the sprawling complex during the fighting and gotten lost.
The four-day confrontation began when al-Qaida-affiliated militants stormed the remote desert natural-gas complex and took hostages last Wednesday and was punctuated by exploding cars, attacks from helicopters and a final assault by Algerian special forces.
In all, 37 hostages, including an Algerian security guard, and 29 militants were killed, but five other foreign workers remain unaccounted for.
“Are they dead? Did they attempt to flee the site after the attack like some other expatriates? Are they lost in the desert after taking a wrong turn?” an official who is part of Prime Minister Abdemalek Sellal’s office said. “These are all questions we ask ourselves, but one thing is sure, everything is being done to know their fate.”
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The Ain Amenas gas plant, jointly run by BP, Norway’s Statoil and the Algerian state oil company, is deep in the Sahara, some 800 miles south of the Mediterranean coast, with few population centers nearby.
More than 700 people work at the facility, including 130 foreigners from 26 countries who were targeted by the militants. The Islamists caught as many of those foreign workers as they could and wrapped some with explosives to use as human shields.
Many foreign and Algerian workers hid and then slipped out of the sprawling facility into the hard featureless desert, eventually reaching the Algerian soldiers who had surrounded the complex.
This part of the Algerian Sahara has none of the romance of the rolling velvet dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental to the north or the wild, twisted rock formations of Tassili N’Ajjer National Park farther south. Instead it is flat, dry and cold in the winter, with temperatures dropping to 37 degrees at night.
The hostages also could have died in the fiery shootouts at the plant after being draped with explosive belts. Seven of the bodies recovered have yet to be identified because of their degraded condition, authorities said.
The $2 billion natural-gas complex, which came on line in 2006, was showing signs of life again Tuesday. Dozens of workers swarmed in to clean it up after experts went through and removed explosives that had been planted by militants.
The audacious attack showed the improved capabilities of al-Qaida-linked groups in the Sahara. Some 32 militants - arriving from across North Africa, with two from Canada - participated in the attack. Three were captured and the rest killed. Algeria said the group came from northern Mali, hundreds of miles away, sneaking across the borders of Libya and Niger before finally entering Algeria.
The Pentagon stopped short Tuesday of saying al-Qaida’s North Africa affiliate is definitely to blame for the deadly Algeria terrorist attack,but it said there is good reason to believe that the group had a leading role.
“When it comes to terrorist attacks of this sort in North Africa, AQIM has to be at the top of the list of suspects, I’ll put it that way,” said Pentagon press secretary George Little, referring to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
The White House said the Obama administration is working with the Algerian government to learn more about what happened and did not echo concerns expressed by the British defense minister over the Algerian government’s collaboration.
Information for this article was contributed by Rukmini Callimachi, Robert Burns, Nedra Pickler and Bradley Klapper of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 01/23/2013