Kidnappers may kill hostage
2009-12-11 09:03
By Abdel Moneim Abu Edries Ali
Khartoum - A group claiming to have kidnapped three French citizens in Chad and the Central African Republic threatened on Thursday to kill one of the hostages if Paris fails to start negotiations within a week.
"We met (Thursday) and have decided that if in one week France doesn't agree to negotiate with us, we will kill one of the hostages we are holding," Abu Mohammed al-Rizeigi, spokesperson for the kidnappers, said by telephone.
"We will also target French forces in Chad and we will carry out assassinations against French diplomats," he said.
Rizeigi said the hostages were in Chad and in good health, but a Chadian official said later on Thursday that neither the kidnappers nor their victims were in the country.
"We don't know who these people (the kidnappers) are and they are not even in Chad," he said on condition of anonymity.
Negotiate through a third part
The French embassy in Ndjamena declined to comment on the matter, saying it was being dealt with by Paris.
A shadowy Darfur group calling itself Falcons for the Liberation of Africa has claimed the kidnappings of a French agronomist with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and two unidentified staff of relief agency Triangle in the Central African Republic (CAR).
On November 30, the group threatened it would kill the aid workers but did not specify a deadline.
"We want to negotiate directly with France, but France wants to negotiate through a third party like Chad. We reject that," Rizeigi said at the time. "We're going to kill them because France is not negotiating directly with us."
In an interview last month, ICRC worker Laurent Maurice, who was kidnapped in a Chadian village near the Sudanese border, said he was bearing up despite the ordeal.
Difficult relations
The group also claimed responsibility for kidnapping two other aid workers, a Frenchwoman and a Canadian, earlier this year. They were held for 25 days before being released in April.
The motives of the group have been shadowy ever since that abduction, and it remains unclear whether the appeal for a change of France's policy is genuine or a cover for a ransom demand.
Paris has difficult relations with the Sudanese government as it hosts a leading Darfur rebel leader - Abdel Wahid Nur - and has troops across the border in both Chad and the CAR.
Over the past three years, the armed groups in Darfur - rebels and pro-government militia alike - have splintered into two dozen separate factions, some of them with no clear political aims.
The ICRC has already said that it received a ransom demand for a second staff member, Gauthier Lefevre, who was abducted inside Sudan in November.
The spate of abductions has hit relief efforts in the region. Six organisations suspended their operations in eastern Chad after Maurice's kidnapping, depriving 37 000 people of aid.
- SAPA