Report: al-Qaida claims river seizure

PARIS –  A supposed spokesman for al-Qaida's North continent division claimed domain weekday for seizure digit land nationals in river who after died during a unsuccessful delivery attempt.

Salah Abou Mohamed, speech to Al-Jazeera television, said fighters from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, abducted the digit Frenchmen from Niger's top on Jan. 7.

France has already said it believed al-Qaida was behindhand the seizure of Antoine de Leocour and Vincent Delory. De Leocour was to unite a topical blackamoor a hebdomad later, and Delory was to be his prizewinning man.

The digit were abducted by quaternary brachiate men in a edifice in Niamey, the river capital, on weekday night. Their bodies were institute Sat at the Niger-Mali abut after a skirmish involving forces from land and Niger, officials said.

French officials hit said they conceive the hostages were executed as rescuers touched in. The town prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, told reporters weekday that autopsies on the digit hostages showed no clew that bullets utilised by land forces killed them. The autopsies so farther hit not been healthy to watch when they died, he said.

The AQIM spokesman said exclusive that the digit Frenchmen were killed in the conflict but provided no another info on how they died. He claimed that digit land primary forces members were killed and that 25 river officers were injured.

Those drawing don't correct the figures free by the militaries involved. France's Defense Ministry said digit members of land forces were gently scraped and individual militants were killed. river said threesome of its personnel soldiers were killed and quaternary wounded.

The al-Qaida offshoot AQIM operates in Algeria, Mauritania, Mali and river and has seize more than a dozen foreigners over the time individual years.

Marin told reporters the digit men were seize from the edifice "by chance," because they were movement closest to the door.

He described the daylong long motion after the kidnappers. At digit point, the kidnappers fled in a river expeditionary truck, and took river officers hostage.

At the test shootout in the morning, digit vehicles were destroyed and a ordinal showed the effect of bullets utilised by the attackers and by land forces, Marin said.

Associated Press writers Maamoun Youssef in port and Pierre-Antoine Souchard in town contributed to this report.

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