By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: February 19, 2013

LAGOS, Nigeria — Seven French tourists, including four children, were kidnapped in northern Cameroon on Tuesday, the second large-scale hostage-taking in the region in four days. The French president and foreign minister pointed the finger at Islamist terrorist groups operating across the border in northeast Nigeria, possibly including the deadly Boko Haram organization.

The family was seized near a national park in the far north.

The kidnappings appeared to be part of the widening fallout from France’s military intervention against Islamist militants in northern Mali. Though French officials did not explicitly link the two in their statements on Tuesday, they invoked them together and vowed to continue the Mali campaign. All told, about 15 French citizens are now being held captive in West Africa.

The seven kidnapped on Tuesday are all members of the same family who live in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital. They camped on Monday night in Waza National Park in the far north of Cameroon and set out early Tuesday for the animal reserve of Kalamaloue, where they were going to view elephants, a Cameroon park official said. A security official said the group was seized near Dabanga, a frontier town, and was then taken across the Nigerian border into a region of semidesert and scrub where Boko Haram has its base.

Over the past four years, the region has faced dozens of assaults by the terrorist group, including bombings, ambushes and other attacks on civilians and security forces. Harsh counterterrorism tactics by the Nigerian security forces have only marginally damped the campaign.

The French energy company GDF Suez said Tuesday that one of the seven captives was a company employee based in Yaoundé who was involved in developing a natural gas liquefaction plant planned for southern Cameroon. A company spokeswoman confirmed that the man and his six relatives were vacationing in the far north when they were seized.

President François Hollande of France, speaking to reporters in Athens, said the kidnappers were “a terrorist group that we are familiar with, and that is in Nigeria,” adding that “the likeliest possibility is that they were taken to Nigeria.”

Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, was more explicit, saying in Paris that the location of the attack, near the border and the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, where Boko Harum was founded, was “why we think it might be this sect.”

Boko Haram’s campaign of violence against the Nigerian security forces — by some estimates claiming 800 lives last year — had not previously included kidnappings. But they have increasingly become a regular tactic of a breakaway group, Ansaru, which has claimed responsibility for several recent abductions in the region, including seven foreigners taken from a Lebanese construction company’s compound in northern Nigeria on Saturday night. The attackers used dynamite on a protective wall, killed a security guard and took over the compound, taking away an Italian, a Greek, an Englishman, three Lebanese and a Filipino. The group issued a statement linking the kidnapping to the French intervention in Mali.

As of Tuesday night, no group had claimed responsibility for the latest kidnapping, which came on a day of fierce engagements between French and Islamist forces in the desolate desert terrain of northeastern Mali. A French paratrooper was killed in the fighting, the second French fatality in what Mr. Hollande called “the final phase of the operation in Mali.”

Cameroonian and Nigerian authorities had little to say on Tuesday about the abduction of the tourists. Cameroon’s information minister, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, declined to confirm to reporters that the family had been seized and did not respond to later phone calls seeking comment.

In Nigeria, where the ability of terrorist groups to operate relatively unhindered has become an embarrassment to the authorities, an official in Maiduguri dismissed reports that the French captives had been taken across the border into the country.

(CNN) -- Night had fallen. Some 20 airplane passengers had taken their seats for the short hop from Brussels, Belgium, to Zurich, Switzerland.
Unknown to them, a precious cargo was being loaded into the airplane hold along with their suitcases: $50 million in rough and polished diamonds.
But the diamonds would never reach their final destination.
Shortly before 8 p.m. Monday, eight masked men in two vehicles burst through the perimeter fence of Brussels Airport and sped toward the aircraft on the tarmac.
The men, who authorities said wore clothing resembling police uniforms, were heavily armed.
Masked thieves steal diamonds How thieves got $50M in diamonds Race on to find stolen rough diamonds
While no shots were fired and no one was injured, the pilot, co-pilot and a transport security guard were all threatened at gunpoint, said Ine Van Wymersch, of the Public Prosecutor's Office in Brussels.
Within three minutes, the thieves had snatched the diamonds from the hold, said airport spokesman Jan Van der Cruysse.
Drag queens, fake beards and chocolates: Notable diamond heists
Moments later they left the scene, racing out through the same breach in the airport periphery through which they had entered.
The robbers, four in each car, had broken a hole in the fence where it ran between two construction sites, Van Wymersch said at a news conference.
"This was a very precise, almost military-organized and well-executed robbery," Van der Cruysse said.
He said it was a "big surprise" that such a slick heist been possible -- but pointed the finger at organized crime.
"We are an airport that is, as all international airports are, subject to very strict aviation security and safety regulations," he said.
The aircraft targeted was a regular passenger flight operated by Helvetic Airways on behalf of Swiss, Switzerland's national airline.
It's not yet clear how the thieves knew that the diamonds would be on board.
But this was not a chance holdup, said Van Wymersch, describing the men involved as "professionals."
Antwerp, the city known as the world's diamond-cutting capital, lies only about 25 miles away from Brussels.
The Antwerp World Diamond Centre has on average $200 million in stones coming in and out daily, and it takes security very seriously, a spokesman told CNN.
He was unable to confirm reports that gold and platinum were stolen along with the diamonds.
It's not the first time that Antwerp's centuries-old diamond trade has been targeted.
The city was the scene of a spectacular robbery in 2003 when thieves made off with the contents of more than 100 safes at the diamond center. Those gems were never recovered.
Some 34,000 jobs in the city are connected to the diamond trade, according to the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, from mining company representatives to dealers to the craftsmen who polish the stones.

Birth control indeed. This beggars belief in a country with one of the worst maternal and child health indices.
I'm even surprised at the level of support this GEJ's pipe-man's dream is garnering on this forum.
He would be better advised to promulgate a rule to control the avarice in government and make education free and compulsory at least to secondary level. Good and affordable healthcare should not just be free, it is an inalienable human right!

Having worked in naija as a medic I watched children die for peanuts in the arms of their crying mothers.So you will tell such a mother to limit her family size to 4? U must be kidding me! In a country where one of my duties as a junior doctor included attending deliveries with no power supply and hence no functional suction machine to clear the newborn's airways; setting IV lines on very ill children with candle; and having no adhesives to hold the cannulae in place? A poor woman who comes into a tertiary hospital with a ruptured uterus after labouring for days in a traditional birth attendant's 'delivery suite' in my experience had a death sentence until proven otherwise. Only 1 survived among the many I saw. As part of the theatre requirements the poor husband / relatives would be told to provide 3 units of blood before the OP would go on. This is a man who could not afford regular hospital antenatal for the wife in the first instance. The man then travels miles to his village for fundraising from his peasant farmer community. By the time he returns the next morning to try and explain that he could not raise enough funds for the OP the wife would already be at sub-zero temperature in the morgue. This was sadly a true life experience. I'd left the ward that night knowing I would not be seeing that woman in the morning. Comically when the unfortunate young mother was becoming restless and not following instructions due to ongoing exsanguination the nurses were calling her stubborn. Need I go on?.

Some colleagues left the shores of naija for economic reasons; but my main reason for leaving was because I could no longer endure the psychological trauma of seeing countless preventable deaths due either to lack of requisite equipment or in rare instances that they are available patients not being able to afford the 'pay as you go' service. Even countries as poor as Tanzania that depend mostly on foreign aid run a free ambulance service to transfer patients to hospitals (never mind how poorly qualified the paramedics may be). Anything related to pregnancy, including Cesarean section is also free there. I'm talking about a country the same geographical size as naija with only 4 major roads and no single 'flyover'.

I for one would never advocate birth control to the underprivileged in our society when I know those kids have as much chance of making it to their 5th birthdays as GEJ declaring his assets. IMO fix the grinding poverty and illiteracy and every other thing would follow. It would only require the people in high places paying a 'tithe' on their little pleasures to the system. A tenth of the amounts we hear looted would go along way.