NIAMEY: Five Indian citizens were kidnapped in western Niger during an attack last week by armed men that also killed a dozen soldiers, according to two Nigerian security sources and a statement by Indian state authorities seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
Reuters reported on Saturday that 12 soldiers had been killed in the attack a day earlier near the village of Sakoira in the tri-border region, where the West African Sahel countries of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali meet.
The victims were working for an Indian company providing services to Niger’s Kandadji dam project, the two security sources said.
The local government of the Indian state of Jharkhand said in a statement that the five citizens had been working in the Tillaberi region.
It said all five were from Jharkhand and that the Indian embassy in Niger had approached Nigerian authorities for support in securing their release.
The armed men who carried out the kidnapping have not been officially identified, but last month Niger blamed the EIGS group, a Daesh affiliate, for an attack on a mosque near the tri-border area in which at least 44 civilians were killed.
Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso are fighting a jihadist insurgency linked to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State that spun out of a Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali in 2012 and later spread to its neighboring countries.
Kidnappings appear to have intensified this year, with an Austrian woman kidnapped in January and a Swiss citizen earlier in April, both in Niger. Also in January, four Moroccan truck drivers went missing on the border between Niger and Burkina Faso.
Five Indians kidnapped in attack in Niger
https://arab.news/mzj5w
Five Indians kidnapped in attack in Niger
- The victims were working for an Indian company providing services to Niger’s Kandadji dam project
- The armed men who carried out the kidnapping have not been officially identified
Greek coast guard search for 15 after migrant boat found adrift
- The two survivors reported that the vessel had become unstable due to bad weather and there was no means of getting shelter, food or water
ATHENS: Greek coast guard were on Monday searching for 15 people who fell into the water from a migrant boat that was found drifting off the coast of Crete with 17 bodies on board.
The 17 fatalities, all of them men, were discovered on Saturday on the craft, which was taking on water and partially deflated, some 26 nautical miles (48 kilometers) southwest of the island.
Post-mortem examinations were being carried out to determine how they died but Greek public television channel ERT suggested they may have suffered from hypothermia or dehydration.
A Greek coast guard spokeswoman told AFP that two survivors reported that “15 people fell in the water” after the motor cut out on Thursday, then the vessel drifted for two days.
At the time, Crete and much of the rest of Greece was battered by heavy rain and storms.
The two survivors reported that the vessel had become unstable due to bad weather and there was no means of getting shelter, food or water.
The vessel had 34 people on board and had left the Libyan port of Tobruk on Wednesday, the Greek port authorities said. Most of those who died came from Sudan and Egypt.
It was initially spotted by a Turkish-flagged cargo ship on Saturday, triggering a search that included ships and aircraft from the Greek coast guard and the European Union border agency Frontex.
Migrants have been trying to reach Crete from Libya for the last year, as a way of entering the European Union. But the Mediterranean crossing is perilous.
In Brussels, the EU’s 27 members on Monday backed a significant tightening of immigration policy, including the concept of returning failed asylum-seekers to “return hubs” outside the bloc.
The UN refugee agency said more than 16,770 asylum seekers in the EU have arrived on Crete since the start of the year — more than any other island in the Aegean Sea.
Greece’s conservative government has also toughened its migration policy, suspending asylum claims for three months, particularly those coming to Crete from Libya.
