Recent kidnappings of foreigners in Africa’s Sahel region

Nineteen hostages are still held in Africa’s Sahel region, after the liberation on Tuesday of a Swiss woman who was abducted in rebel-held Timbuktu in northern Mali last week.

Northern Mali, in the vast and arid Sahel region, which includes the Sahara desert, has been under the control of Tuareg rebels and Islamists, including Ansar Dine and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for the past month.

On April 17 an Italian hostage kidnapped in southern Algeria by AQIM in February last year was released.

The 19 remaining hostages are being held by AQIM and a splinter group the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO).

They include 12 Europeans abducted in three countries of the Sahel, and seven Algerian diplomats kidnapped in northern Mali.

HOSTAGES DETAINED BY AQIM

– September 16, 2010: Militants seize five French nationals plus a citizen of Togo and a citizen of Madagascar from the huge uranium mine run by the French company Areva at Arlit in northern Niger.

A French woman hostage who is ill is freed along with the Togolese and the Madagascan on February 24, 2011.

On October 7, officials in charge of negotiating the release of the remaining four French nationals say they are in good health, but that their abductors are demanding that France withdraw its forces from Afghanistan.

– November 24, 2011: Two Frenchmen described as geologists are abducted from their hotel in the northern Malian town of Hombori. Two weeks later AQIM publishes photos of the two in captivity. A video shot in late February, seen by AFP, shows the two.

– November 25, 2011: In an attack on Timbuktu, AQIM militants try to seize four Europeans. One of them, a German, is killed while the other three — a Swede, a Dutch national and a Briton who also has South African citizenship — are kidnapped by AQIM.

HOSTAGES DETAINED BY MUJAO

– October 23, 2011: Three aid workers, two Spanish men and an Italian woman, are abducted from a camp for Sahrawi refugees near Tindouf in western Algeria.

– April 5, 2012: The Algerian consul and six of his team are abducted in Gao in northeastern Mali.