Sahara hostage crisis 2003

The 2003 Sahara hostage crisis concerns the events surrounding the abduction of 32 European tourists in seven separate groups in the Algerian Sahara desert in 2003. They were released in two groups: one in Algeria and the other from neighbouring Mali, several months later.

Between February 19 and early April 2003 seven independently mobile parties of European tourists in 4WDs and on motorcycles - 16 Germans, 10 Austrians, 4 Swiss, a Dutchman and a Swede – went missing in the UNESCO-listed Tassili N'Ajjer region of southeast Algeria, most while travelling along the popular 470-km 'Graveyard Piste' between Bordj Omar Driss and Illizi. On 13 April Algerian military sources announced the tourists had been kidnapped but were still alive, but the identity of kidnappers and their demands were not known. The 32 tourists had been divided into two groups. A 1200-strong force of Algerian army and police continued to comb the area using camels, road blocks and helicopters, assisted by a team of specialist officers from German anti-terrorist police. One of the Swiss tourists had called relatives on their satellite phone just after his disappearance, but was cut off in mid-sentence. Many commentators remained perplexed as to how preparations for such a large scale abduction could pass unnoticed in an area where mobility is limited to one highway and a few pistes and valleys frequented by nomads and other locals.

There had been no official word of any ransom demand from their kidnappers, believed to be members of the Salafist Organisation for Prayer and Combat (known by the French acronym GSPC - Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat), a militant Islamic group with links to Al-Qaeda. On 4 May the Algerian government admitted that it had been in talks for some weeks. Although the statement by tourism minister Lakhdar Dorbani did not say to whom officials were talking, it indirectly confirmed for the first time that the tourists had been kidnapped, rather than reiterating the government’s former line that they may have been lost. The German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is reported to have held talks with the Algerian president on efforts to find the tourists.

A group of 17 hostages was freed in a raid on 17 May. The Algerian Army claimed its men freed the group after a ‘brief gunfight’, but the Algerian newspaper al-Watan reported that they had been freed after a battle that left nine of the captors dead in a clash that lasted several hours. The Army were said to have found the captives in two groups in canyons west of Illizi and in the Gharis region, southwest of Amguid army base and 300 km southeast of the town of In Salah. The Algerian Army said that the terrorists killed in the raid were members of the GSPC. They went on to acknowledge the second group of 15 hostages held in the Tamelrik plateau (Oued Samene), 60 km southwest of Ilizzi in southeastern Algeria, were now at much greater risk. The German and Swiss governments expressed dismay at the use of force.

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Wikipedia