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Irish Times
November 3, 2013
Two French journalists were kidnapped and killed in northern Mali yesterday, the French Foreign Ministry said, underscoring the continuing instability of a region retaken from fighters linked to al-Qaida only eight months ago.
The reporters, Ghislaine Dupont (51) and Claude Verlon (58) worked for Radio France Internationale, a French state-supported broadcaster. They had been interviewing a leader with a separatist group in the town of Kidal in Mali’s unstable desert north.
Gunmen forced the reporters into a truck as they were leaving the leader’s house in the center of town yesterday afternoon, a ranking officer in Mali’s army said.
Their bodies were found shortly after, with their throats slit, several miles outside Kidal in the Sahara, the officer, Col Didier Dacko, said by telephone.
French forces stationed in the town pursued the kidnappers, according to an official with the military in Kidal who insisted on anonymity.
“Lots of military vehicles sped out of town,” the official said, “even helicopters.” The kidnappers apparently realized that “they were not going to make it” with their hostages, at which point they killed them, the official said.
They then fled into the hills surrounding Kidal, he said.
A French military spokesman, Col Gilles Jaron, said a patrol was dispatched from Kidal after French forces there were alerted, and two helicopters were called in from Tessalit, 170kms to the north. The patrol found the bodies of the journalists east of Kidal, but French forces never made contact with the kidnappers, he said.
The kidnapping occurred less than a week after four French hostages were released by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in neighboring Niger after being held for over three years in the desert, and on payment of a substantial ransom, according to reports.
The man the two French journalists had been interviewing – Ambeiry Ag Rhissa, an official with the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, a Tuareg separatist group known by its French initials, MNLA – heard a strange noise outside his door immediately after they left his home, RFI reported.
