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2020-10-10 Africa North
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French aid worker freed by captors returns home from Mali
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[AlAhram] French aid worker Sophie Petronin was reunited with her family on home soil Friday, a day after being freed by Death Eaters in Mali who kidnapped the 75-year-old on Christmas eve nearly four years ago.
President Emmanuel Macron and other officials greeted Petronin, La Belle France's last known citizen to be held hostage anywhere in the world, as she stepped off a plane at the Villacoublay airbase south of Gay Paree shortly after midday.
Petronin was released by her captors along with a prominent Malian politician, Soumaila Cisse, and two Italian hostages, who were also on their way home Friday, according to an airport source in Mali's capital Bamako.
Italian priest Pier Luigi Maccalli, who was kidnapped in neighbouring Niger in 2018, and Nicola Chiacchio, who went missing last year while on a solo bicycle trip, were also freed.
Mali's government has been struggling against a brutal jihadist insurgency that emerged in the north in 2012, which has since spread to central Mali as well as to Burkina Faso
...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president is currently Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and will leave office feet first, one way or the other...
and Niger.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in the conflict and hundreds of thousands have been displaced, and kidnappings are common.
Mali's former colonial power La Belle France has 5,100 soldiers deployed across the Sahel as part of its anti-jihadist Operation Barkhane.
Speaking to news hounds, Petronin thanked the Malian and French governments for their help.
"For Mali, I will pray and implore the blessing and the mercy of Allah, because I am a Moslem," she said.
"You say Sophie, but it's Mariam, you have before you," she added.
Petronin appeared in good spirits despite concerns about her health after a 2018 hostage video showed her looking emaciated.
- DIFFICULT TALKS -
One of the hostage negotiators, who requested anonymity, told AFP the talks remained difficult to the end.
The intermediary said releasing prisoners had been unavoidable. "Yes, bandidos Death Eaters were released," he said. "We had to obtain the release."
The office of Mali's prime minister said the four hostages had been held by the Group to Support Islam and Moslems.
The alliance comprises jihadist groups aligned to al-Qaeda, and has grabbed credit for some of the biggest attacks in the Sahel.
The prisoner release came with an interim government due to govern Mali for 18 months before staging elections after a military junta overthrew president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August.
The kidnapping of former opposition leader Cisse was one of the factors that fuelled popular protests leading to Keita's ouster over his perceived inability to crush the Islamist insurgency.
Several hostages remain detained by bad boy groups in the Sahel.
Nicola Chiacchio and Pier Luigi Maccalli's liberation was announced by the Malian government on Thursday.
Maccalli, a priest who had been living in Niger for 11 years, was kidnapped from his home in 2018 in the southwest of the country near the border with Burkina Faso. He appeared in a hostage video in March this year in the company of fellow Italian Chiacchio.
Italian media reports said Chiacchio was a young tourist who disappeared in northern Mali in February last year when he was cycling around the volatile region. 
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Posted by trailing wife 2020-10-10 00:00||
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File under: al-Qaeda in North Africa
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