Another hostage in Mali, a Swiss woman, was killed by her captors. Bern officially announced it on Friday evening, October 9th. We do not currently know if his death has anything to do with the release of Soumaila Cissé and Sophie Pétronin.
The Swiss authorities have not announced the name of the hostage who would have been killed, reports our correspondent in Geneva, Jeremiah Lanche. She is a 40-year-old missionary. Originally from Basel, she was kidnapped four years ago in Timbuktu by a group linked to al-Qaeda.
She had already been abducted briefly in 2012 when the city fell to jihadists. She had appeared in a video of her captives in 2017, visibly weakened and emaciated.
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He died a month ago
it is Sophie Petronin who informed the French authorities of his death. It would go back a month. The head of Swiss diplomacy, Ignazio Cassis, condemned the “cruel act” and expressed his “most sincere sympathy with the victim’s relatives”.
The Federal Council specifies that the victim “would have been killed by the kidnappers of the Islamist terrorist organization Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslim”. Switzerland is now trying to find out the exact circumstances of the death of its nationals as well as where her body is located.
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