Al-Qaeda beheads French 'spy'
Al-Qaeda's north African branch claims to have beheaded a French hostage in Mali as a "spy".
An ethnic Tuareg Malian soldier stands guard at a checkpoint in Gao. Photo: REUTERS
Agence France-Pressed, edited by Bonnie Malkin 12:52AM GMT 20 Mar 2013
A man claiming to be a spokesman for Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM, told Mauritania's ANI news agency late last night that Philippe Verdon had been executed on March 10 "in response to France's intervention in Northern Mali".
"The French President (François) Hollande is responsible for the lives of the other French hostages," the spokesman warned. France says it is still trying to verify the report, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying that "we don't know at the moment" whether it is reliable.
In all 15 French nationals are being held captive in Africa – the largest number of any nation in the world - with AQIM claiming responsibility for six of the kidnappings. AQIM has previously threatened to kill the hostages if France intervened militarily in Mali and has demanded a 90 million euro ransom for their release.
The execution claim came a day after it emerged that the French government has ended its unofficial tradition of paying ransom money to release hostages, with Mr Hollande cited as saying he would no longer pay groups with whom France was “at war”.
Mr Verdon, a geologist, was captured on the night of November 24, 2011 along with Serge Lazarevic from their hotel in Hombori, northeastern Mali, while they were on a business trip.
The families have denied that the two men were mercenaries or secret service agents. AQIM claimed responsibility for the kidnappings and released a video of Mr Verdon in August in which he describes the "difficult living conditions".
Fears among hostages’ families had increased due to France's military offensive aimed at ousting Islamists from northern Mali. Yesterday, Mr Verdon's father Jean-Pierre Verdon said he was totally in the dark about his son’s predicament. "We are in a total fog and it is impossible to live this way," he told RTL radio. "We have no information."
Paris deployed forces in Mali on January 11 to help stop Al-Qaeda linked fighters in control of the North from moving southward and threatening the capital Bamako. France now has more than 4,000 troops on the ground in Mali, with around 1,200 currently conducting clean-up operations in the northeast after reclaiming key towns.
The French troops in the region are backed up by African forces, with Chad having suffered casualties with at least 26 deaths. France has lost five soldiers. On Tuesday it announced that 15 Islamist fighters had been killed in recent days in the northern Mali region of Gao, with the seizure of a large cache of arms and ammunition.
It is carrying out DNA tests to determine whether top Islamist rebels, Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, were among those killed in fighting earlier this month.
