Balance sheet of the confrontation three killed terrorists

The responsibility of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), branch of the terrorist movement in North Africa international founded by Saudi Osama bin Laden and Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, little doubt (according to Alain Juppé): two young French abducted Friday night in the bar and restaurant the Toulouse of Niamey, the capital of Niger, were cold-bloodedly executed on the border with Mali by their captors from this movementintercepted by special forces françaises and the Niger army. Both aged twenty-five years, Antoine de Léocour and Vincent j. Delorey were from the same small town in the suburbs of Lille, Linselles.

Installed in Niamey, engaged for six months, since the end of 2009, by the German NGO Help, the first was his marriage, which was to be celebrated next Saturday, with his fiancée, Rakia Hassan Kouka. The second, Antoine de Léocour childhood friend, had joined him to be his witness. Their brief but tragic Odyssey began with the incursion in the bar very frequented by the some 1,500 nationals French in Niger of four armed men, speaking Arabic and French, who were forced into their 4 X 4. The vehicle immediately took the direction of Mali where organization has some local complicity. Spotted by a French surveillance aircraft dispatched the area last September after the kidnapping of seven people including five French to Arlit in the North of Niger, the kidnappers have been shortly after a first attack of the armed forces of Niger which joined the men of the French special forces. "We are fully" the decision to intervene, said Alain Juppé yesterday. Balance sheet of the confrontation: three killed terrorists. It is in this framework that the abductors decided to kill their hostages.

The tragic outcome of the operation has not shaken the French determination "to fight tirelessly terrorist barbarity", reads in a release of the Elysée. Nicolas Sarkozy has described the murder of two young French of "barbaric and cowardly act." The France appears at the top of the targets of the organization. This organization holds five French hostages since mid-September in northeastern Mali. January 6, a Tunisian of twenty-five years claiming to represent this group detonated a gas cylinder before the France Embassy in Bamako. Previously, end July 2010, Michel Germaneau, a French retired and ailing, seventy-eight years old, abducted April 19 with his driver in the North of Niger, was killed by a cell of organization led by the Algerian Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, who had already executed British hostage, Edwin Dyer.

The terrorists of the organization require that the France withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. They avail themselves of the assistance of local bands of offenders they employ low works. The organization is directly derived from the Salafist Group for preaching and combat (GSPC), Algerian armed Islamist training that formally embraced the global Al-Qaida network end of January 2007. Combated without mercy and with some efficiency by the Algerian armed forces, its principal theatre of operations is moved in the desert of the Sahel, including almost uninhabited areas of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali and Niger. Among the objectives of the Organization, according to some experts in security, the extension of its shares in Chad, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.

Aware of the growing danger incurred by the French in this region, the Quai d'Orsay warned yesterday that they "need more that never be, at any time and in any place, the greatest vigilance and extreme prudence.." The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and request "to the French to restrict their movements in referring to the particulars in the"travel tips"specific to each of the countries of the Sahel (Mauritania, Mali and Niger), as well as on the websites of our embassies on the spot".