Niger rebels free ill hostages
2008-02-03 13:20
Dakar - Niger's Tuareg rebels handed two civilian hostages requiring medical treatment over to a Red Cross mission visiting their prisoners, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Saturday.
The ICRC said the mission to northern Niger between January 26 and February 1 had seen 33 prisoners, mainly members of government forces, who had been able to talk to their families by satellite telephone or write them messages.
They had also been given medical aid, blankets, clothing and other supplies.
But only two people, who needed urgent medical care, had left with the mission, the ICRC said, without specifying if they were civilian or military.
They had been taken to the town of Arlit where they were handed over to government authorities.
On two previous missions, in June and July last year, the ICRC had secured the release of 33 soldiers and one Chinese civilian, held by the Tuareg Movement of Niger People for Justice (MNJ).
Even while the Red Cross team was on its latest visit, rebels seized four more civilians, including an imam and a teacher, during an attack in the Arlit region, officials said on Monday.
The reported abductions come just days after the MNJ's capture of a regional civilian administrator and four soldiers during a January 21 raid in the northern town of Tanhout.
The MNJ announced on its website it would treat both its military and civilian hostages "well".
Active since February 2007 in the barren but uranium-rich north, the MNJ says peace will not return to the region without better integration of Tuaregs into the army, paramilitary corps and the local mining sector.
In an interview published on Thursday, rebel leader Rhissa Ag Boula said uranium mines operated by French company Areva and convoys serving them would be targeted again.
In April last year, MNJ rebels attacked Areva's biggest uranium project, demanding better application of the economic aspects of the 1995 peace agreements that ended a first Tuareg rebellion.