Al-Qaida claims it killed British hostage in Sahara

AL-QAIDA’S north African wing has said it had carried out its threat to kill a British hostage it was holding in the Sahara.

Britain said it had reason to believe the hostage, Edwin Dyer, had been killed. Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the killing as “a barbaric act of terrorism” and said the killers would be hunted down.

An official source in Algeria, which has been the main focus of activities for al-Qaida’s North African wing, said: “The Briton, according to our information, has been killed by AQIM (al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) in Mali.”

The group had said it would kill the Briton if the British government did not release Abu Qatada, a Jordanian Islamist it is holding in prison. A Spanish judge has named him as the right-hand man in Europe for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

Dyer was killed on May 31 after a second deadline for the group’s demands expired, it said in a statement on a website used by al-Qaida-linked groups.

“The British captive was killed so that he, and with him the British state, may taste a tiny portion of what innocent Muslims taste every day at the hands of the Crusader and Jewish coalition to the east and to the west,” the statement said.

“Al-Qaida’s top messages are first, that a day before his expected speech to the Muslim world Obama must understand that al-Qaida is a force in the region that cannot be ignored,” Hamid Ghomrassa, an expert in security issues who writes for Algeria’s El Khabar newspaper, said.

“And second, that al-Qaida’s threats should be taken seriously,” he said.