Latest News

The hundreds of workers at the plant when it was taken over last month found themselves caught between the ruthless militants on the inside and an Algerian Army ringing the perimeter that was bent on showing no weakness. As the realization dawned on the captors that they, too, were essentially captives, they grew agitated and more aggressive, witnesses say. Moreover, the plant's operations had shut down during their initial assault.

Bristling with weapons, they made their demands known to the remaining employees: restart the plant, get the compressors working again and turn the power back on.

"They pushed me very hard to restart the plant," said Lotfi Benadouda, the Algerian plant executive whom the militants singled out as the man in charge. "Their objective was to move the hostages to the plant. They wanted to get to the factory with the hostages, and explode it."

A more complete view of the hostage drama in the Sahara that began the morning of Jan. 16, and of the militants' motives in carrying it out, has emerged as some of the captives provided detailed accounts of the four-day standoff, which left at least 37 foreign hostages and 29 kidnappers dead.

Their accounts contradicted some of the Algerian government's public assertions about the crisis and supported others. At times, the government said the militants planned to destroy the gas complex and kill the hostages en masse, but it provided no details or evidence to back up that assertion. At other times, government officials, defending a military raid on the facility, said the militants sought to flee and take captives into the desert, an assertion that some of the captives contradicted.

Now it seems clear that the siege was about more than disabling the plant, and that holding hostages for ransom was not part of the plan. Instead, the militants sought to orchestrate a spectacular fireball that could have killed everyone in the vicinity. While that plot could offer more justification for the Algerian government's take-no-prisoners response, questions remain about whether the standoff could have been ended with fewer lives lost.

To visit the plant is to appreciate both its vulnerability and the opportunity it afforded the militants, who traveled a mere 30 miles through the Sahara's sands, across the border from Libya, to attack it.

The plant's production towers rise suddenly and starkly out of the nearly featureless desert landscape at Tiguentourine after a 45-minute drive from the nearest Algerian settlement, the town of In Amenas. The isolation appears total; there is nothing around it but a sea of sand.

The fierceness of the fight to retake the complex by Algerian security services over four days in mid-January is still evident. Bullet holes pockmark the low, sand-color living quarters; deep gashes in one wall are a testament to the artillery fired on both sides. Between the living quarters and the plant itself, a 10-minute drive, a jumble of shredded, carbonized vehicle remnants stick out from the sand.

Still unclear was whether some of the carnage was avoidable, as officials in foreign capitals have suggested. The Algerians remain convinced their doctrine of no negotiations and maximum force was the right course of action.

What appears increasingly certain is that the attackers benefited from inside help. They used a map to guide them around the facility, and at least one of them had once worked at the plant as a driver, officials said. But what the militants lacked was the technical expertise to execute the dramatic ending that some captives say was envisioned.

The Algerian authorities credit one of the facility's security agents at an outer guard post with sounding a crucial alarm before being shot in the head. The guard, Lahmar Amine, has since been hailed as a national hero in the Algerian news media, and Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal credited him with allowing workers at the plant to shut down gas production.

Others said the militants might have inadvertently cut the power during their assault, thus preventing the plant from operating.

"The plant was shut down because the terrorists blew up the generators," said an employee at the facility who asked not to be named to avoid repercussions with his employer. The valves needed power to function, he said, and restarting the facility was a much more involved process than taking it down. "It wasn't going to be started for a long time," the employee said.

Outside experts said that even with rocket-propelled grenades and high-grade explosives, a natural-gas plant would have been harder to destroy than the militants may have realized. "Natural gas does not explode unless it is in a confined area," said E. Darron Granger, the senior vice president for engineering and construction at Cheniere Energy, a liquefied natural gas terminal company.

Mr. Benadouda, the plant's director general and the militants' main interlocutor for the first two days of the crisis, was still visibly affected by what he had been through. He recalled on Thursday seeing colleagues blown apart and militants' corpses severed in half, and he was speaking from a central courtyard where, two weeks earlier, hostages had been assembled and menacingly sorted. "I saw many bad things, terrible things," he said, turning away.

The hostage drama began before dawn on Wednesday, Jan. 16, with the bright muzzle flashes of automatic rifles in the dark Saharan night. A busload of expatriate workers was leaving the facility in an armed convoy when the attackers opened fire. The militants split into two groups, one taking over the living quarters, and the other headed for the gas production facility, which they mined with explosives, witnesses said. Once inside the living quarters, "they were firing everywhere," said an engineer, Djamel Bourkaib, who stood as he spoke in the shadow of the giant In Amenas towers, still blackened by an explosion during the siege. "If it moved, they shot at it."

Quickly, the militants began to separate foreign workers — American, British, Japanese and Norwegian — from the Algerians, who were told they would not be harmed. "The terrorists tried to restart the plant in order to get maximum pressure," Mr. Bourkaib said. "They were looking for engineers to restart the plant."

Hours into the siege, the gunmen recognized Mr. Benadouda as a man who could be useful to them. That was when the pressure started on him to restart the plant. "We gave them vehicles and food, but we didn't restart the plant," Mr. Benadouda said.

By the first evening, tension was building inside the living quarters. The power was still off, everything was dark and the militants were starting to run out of battery charge on their communications equipment. With military forces building up outside, even the militants "thought they were going to be attacked," Mr. Benadouda said.

On Thursday, Jan. 17, some of the militants, who had communicated that they were protesting the French military intervention in Mali, gathered hostages laden with explosives in five vehicles. The army started firing inside the compound, wounding the militants' leader. The militants panicked, Mr. Benadouda said, and hundreds of Algerian workers fled.

The militants assembled a convoy carrying foreign hostages. What happened next is still unclear and the source of debate.

Some reports in the Algerian news media speak of army helicopters firing missiles at the procession of vehicles, causing several to explode. Mr. Sellal, at a Jan. 21 news conference, simply said, "There was a strong response from the army, and three cars exploded." Among the casualties, he said, was Taher Bechneb, the militants' leader, and some of the hostages.

But a senior official who requested anonymity maintained in an interview that militants in three of the vehicles, realizing that they were immobilized, simply blew themselves and the cars up. A recently retired senior officer who still has ties with his former colleagues also said that no missiles were fired at the cars.

The hostage crisis dragged on for two more days, but the events of Jan. 17 were crucial. The core of the militant operation, including its leadership, had been devastated. The remnants were now at the gas-producing section of the complex, but they did not know how to destroy it.

On Saturday, Jan. 19, the militants parked a car packed with explosives under two central gas-producing towers, then placed five handcuffed hostages — three Norwegians and two Americans, executives at the plant — above the car, workers said. All of the foreigners died in the resulting explosion, workers said.

In the military's final assault, army snipers killed many of the militants, Mr. Sellal said at the news conference as he defended the government's approach toward militants whose goal officials here are convinced was a fiery end.

"If you don't terrorize the terrorists, they will terrorize you," the senior Algerian official said in the interview.

Sarai Sierra in an undated family photo in New York.

Here, amid dozens of organic farms, orchards and ranches, the federal government is opening up thousands of acres of public land for oil and gas drilling, part of its largest energy lease sale in Colorado since Mr. Obama took office.

In all, leases for 114,932 acres of federal land across Colorado are being auctioned off next month — a tiny piece of what Mr. Obama lauded during last year's campaign as a historic effort to increase domestic natural-gas production. Those holes have to be drilled somewhere, and the move to lease public lands in this valley has stirred a fierce debate, one that has aligned Republican residents more closely to the government's plans than Democrats.

Coloradans in solidly red cities west of here are the ones who have written letters to the government supporting the lease sale, saying it will bring jobs and tax revenues. In Paonia, where political lines are more evenly split, residents have come out overwhelmingly against the idea of drilling, saying it threatens a new economy rooted in tourism, wineries and organic peaches.

"It's just this land-grab, rape-and-pillage mentality," said Landon Deane, who has 80 cows on a ranch near several federal parcels being put up for lease.

Because of the quirks of mineral ownership in the West, which can divide ownership of land and the minerals under it, one parcel up for bid sits directly below Ms. Deane's fields, where she has recently been thinking of sowing hops for organic beer.

"All it takes is one spill," she said, "and we're toast."

Paonia takes its environmental debates seriously — so much so that in 2003, someone upset over insecticide spraying set off a bomb in the headquarters of the town's Mosquito Control District (no one was hurt).

For years, activists in town raged against the century-old coal mines about 10 miles up the road, before eventually reaching a détente with the industry, which provides hundreds of jobs in the valley. Paonia is also home to an award-winning community radio station and The High Country News, a nonprofit newspaper that covers land and environmental issues across the West.

Last week, the forces of government and upset residents collided like two weather fronts in a packed, stifling town meeting.

Officials from the Bureau of Land Management explained the situation: under 90-year-old laws, companies and people can nominate public lands for drilling, and the government is obliged to auction them off after months of review and public comment. The officials explained that they had removed some of the most sensitive and contentious pieces of land from consideration, but said the auction was happening.

About 200 residents sat on the floor, lined the walls and spilled into the hallway, jeering and hooting as officials insisted — sometimes patiently, sometimes brusquely — that the drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing was safe and that there would be little environmental impact on the valley. They applauded as Town Council members pressed federal officials on the drilling's potential effects on the town's air, water and economy — eliciting responses that were as unsatisfactory to the crowd as a bushel of mealy peaches.

"I can't guarantee you there won't be a spill," Lonny Bagley, the land management agency's deputy state director for energy and minerals, told the audience. "I can't guarantee there won't be a blowout."

Paonia's mayor, Neal Schwieterman, pressed officials on why they had used a 30-year-old resource plan to evaluate whether drilling would mesh with the valley's lifestyle and growing tourism economy. Why not delay any lease sale, he asked, until the bureau could write a new blueprint for land management in the area?