[Rooters] Inquiries into the bloody assault on an Algerian gas plant are uncovering increasing evidence of contacts between the assailants and the jihadis involved in killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya nearly a year ago.The extent of the contacts between the Death Eaters is still unclear and nobody is sure there was a direct link between the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the carnage at In Amenas, where 39 foreign hostages were killed in January.
But the findings, according to three sources with separate knowledge of U.S. investigations, shed some light on the connections between Al Qaeda affiliates stretching ever further across North and West Africa.
At the center of the web is Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has expanded far from its Algerian birthplace and now has links to other jihadi groups in Maghreb countries, including Tunisia and Libya. Their shared ideology combines with other, often financial, interests.
Despite being driven from large parts of the West African state of Mali by a French-led military operation early this year, AQIM Death Eaters are strengthening their presence elsewhere.
Four months after the In Amenas raid, the attack's criminal mastermind, Mokhtar Belmokhtar - who has strained but functioning relations with AQIM's leadership - grabbed credit for an attack on a uranium mine run by La Belle France's Areva in Niger far to the south.
Belmokhtar has also launched attacks in the past in Mauritania, while AQIM uses the centuries-old Mauritanian tradition of Islamic scholarship to give religious justification to its actions - as well as increasing its regional appeal.
With tension growing in Tunisia between opposition secularists and the Islamist government, hardline Salafists
...Salafists are ostentatiously devout Moslems who figure the ostentation of their piety gives them the right to tell others how to do it and to kill those who don't listen to them...
are an increasingly important part of the equation there.
AQIM is believed to be involved in fighting with the Tunisian army on the Tunisian-Algerian border, according to an Algerian security source.
At the same time, AQIM is building links with groups such as the Ansar al-Sharia
...a Yemeni Islamist militia which claims it is not part of al-Qaeda, even though it works about the same and for the same ends...
Tunisia, which seeks to expand its followers through Salafist missionary work or "dawa" rather than violent jihad.
AQIM's links to Libyan groups have grown stronger during the chaos that ensued after the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Qadaffy
... who had more funny outfits than Louis XIV...
, who had kept all Islamists in check.
Some of the men involved in the Algerian raid took part in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died, one source with knowledge of the inquiry said.
A second source said there had definitely been some kind of contact between the Benghazi and In Amenas attackers but could not say to what extent.
A third source said some of the jihadis at In Amenas had bought weapons and stayed for months in the Libyan city of El Aouinet near the Algerian border, where they met some of the men behind the Benghazi attack.