Splinter group claims responsibility for taking Spanish aid workers
Little-known terrorist organization issues statement confirming it is holding two Spaniards and an Italian
A little-known terrorist group, based somewhere in the Sahara, on Saturday claimed responsibility for the October 23 kidnapping of two Spanish aid workers and an Italian colleague from a Sahrawi refugee camp near the Polisario Front's headquarters in Algeria.
The so-called Jamat Tawid Wal Jihad Fi Garbi Afriqqiya — "Unity Movement for Jihad in West Africa" — told AFP in a brief statement that it was holding Ainhoa Fernández de Rincón and Enric Gonyalon, along with the Italian Rosella Urra, all of whom were taken from the camp in Rabouni, Algeria. The group claims it is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM).
"This is the Jamat Tawhid Wal Jihad Fi Garbi Afriqqiya in West Africa. We claim the operation carried out on October 23 at Tindouf when two Spaniards and an Italian were kidnapped," said the audio and written message sent to AFP's correspondent in Bamako, Mali.
Until Saturday, the kidnapping case of the three aid workers was an unusual one because no one had claimed responsibility or made any demands for their release. The statement from Jamat Tawid Wal Jihad Fi Garbi Afriqqiya came just 36 hours after AQIM denied that it was holding Fernández del Rincón, Gonyalons and Urru. AQIM released a video of five westerners it was holding but none of the three were among them.
The acknowledgment by Jamat Tawid Wal Jihad Fi Garbi Afriqqiya is also peculiar because French-speaking reporters who work at the AFP bureau in Bamako don't speak Arabic, the language of the communiqué. At the same time, terrorist groups active in the region usually send their statements to other news outlets, such as Al Jazeera or the independent Mauritanian news agency ANI, which has sometimes conducted interviews with terrorist group members in the past.
Spanish government intelligence believes that the three are being held by a local criminal gang that split recently from AQIM. To try to establish contact with the gang, the government recently recruited Spain's former ambassador to Ethiopia, Antonio Sánchez-Benedito.
Such AQIM splinter groups usually focus on contraband activities, such as tobacco and arms trafficking, in order to survive. Last Thursday, a patrol of the Polisario Front attacked a caravan in northern Mauritania that was carrying a group of hoodlums who are thought to have knowledge about the October 23 kidnapping. The Polisario killed a well-known smuggler and took 10 others to Rabouni to be interrogated.
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