AP News, June 22nd, 2007
Rebels attacked an army base in Niger on Friday, killing 13 soldiers, wounding 30 and taking at least 47 prisoners, according to a government statement.
The statement read on national TV by government spokesman Mohamed Ben Omar said a group of heavily armed men attacked security forces early Friday in a remote Sahara outpost not far from the Libyan border.
In a radio address soon after, Aghali Alambo, the commander of the Niger Movement for Justice, an ethnic Tuareg group that earlier this week claimed responsibility for an assault on a local airport, said his group was behind the attack.
Omar identified the place of the attack as "near Mount Tazarzat, by a water hole," an area approximately 1,200 miles from Niamey. He declined to identify the attackers, just as earlier in the week, officials said "bandits" were behind an attack on a Sahara airport.
Alambo said the attack on the security forces was meant as revenge "for the fact that the president continues to refer to us as bandits and drug traffickers."
On Monday, Alambo had similarly claimed responsibility for an assault on the international airport in Agadez, 460 miles northeast of Niamey. The purpose of that attack, he said on the radio, was to destroy a fleet of planes used by the military to pinpoint the group's desert hideout.
Omar said the "government of Niger will not be swayed in its fight against terrorism."
Though one of the poorest nations in the world, Niger, a former French colony has been largely peaceful since a 1999 coup in which military officers took over the government, but then ushered in elections later that year.
