Big News Network.com Wednesday 30th October, 2013
PARIS, France - Four Frenchmen held hostage by Al Qaeda militants for about three years reached their homes in France Wednesday amid speculations that a ransom of $26 million was paid to secure their freedom from the punishing African Sahel.
They were abducted in raids by Al Qaeda linked militants targeting French firms operating uranium mine Sep 16, 2010 and were retrieved in the northern desert of neighbouring Mali on Tuesday.
The four Pierre Legrand, Thierry Dol, Marc Feret and Larribe were working in Arlit, Niger, where the French state-controlled nuclear giant Areva operates a uranium mine.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for the abduction and later posted videos showing that the men were alive. They were believed to have been kidnapped by Abu Zeid, the militant group's deputy commander, who was killed in an airstrike in Mali this year.
President Francois Hollande greeted each of the hostages on the tarmac at a military airport outside Paris. Emotions ran high when the four landed at the airport. The wife and daughters of Larribe rushed to hug him, and the three held each other as they cried.
Hollande said that it has been "three years of suffering for these citizens, who have been held by jailers without scruples, and three years of suffering for the families who have lived hell and today are relieved".
Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian had flown to Niger to pick them up. The ministers said the four were freed without a military assault or a ransom being paid.
President Hollande has also said France has ended a policy of paying ransoms for hostages, but suspicion that it still does has been a source of tension with the United States. France brushed off an allegation by a former US diplomat that it paid a $17 million ransom in vain for the release of the hostages abducted in 2010 from Niger.
But an unnamed source, quoted by French newspaper Le Monde, said $26 million was paid to secure the release of the four. The money was extracted from a secret fund operated by the intelligence services.
The global intelligence company Stratfor estimates that Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, has carried out at least 18 kidnappings since 2003, raising an estimated $89 million in ransom payments.
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