Suspected al Qaeda-linked militants in Niger who kidnapped two young Frenchmen apparently executed the hostages during an attempted rescue mission by Niger and French troops, officials said Sunday. A French husband-to-be and his childhood friend, both 25, were seized by gunmen with assault rifles at a restaurant in Niamey on Friday and found dead after the military's failed rescue operation in the desert on Saturday.
"Pending the outcome of an investigation, everything seems to indicate that the two French hostages were executed," said Thierry Burkhard, a spokesman for the armed forces in the French defence ministry.
Defence Minister Alain Juppe was heading to Niamey for talks on Monday with Niger officials and French nationals there, the ministry said.
One of the dead hostages was a former aid worker who had been due to marry a Nigerien woman next week. The other was his best man, according to France's Journal du Dimanche, who had just arrived in Niamey for the ceremony.
The hostages' local member of parliament named them as Antoine de Leocour, who had worked in Niger, and Vincent Delory, two friends who had grown up together on the same street in the small northern French town of Linselles.
Leocour's fiancee, Rakia Hassan Kouka, told AFP she would pray for the two young men. "I'm in no state to talk right now, I'm in shock, I can't believe it," she said, choking back tears. "I'm going to pray a lot for them, so that they can go to paradise."
Another childhood friend of Leocour, named as Louis, told France's Europe 1 radio station that he arrived in Niamey on Friday night to join him, only to hear the news of the abduction.
"We came to see him married and now we're going to see him buried," he said. "I am torn between pain and hatred."
Burkhard said a French surveillance aircraft backing up Niger armed forces chased the kidnappers and caught up with them in the desert, enabling troops on the ground to attack.
A commander in the Niger forces was wounded in a first clash with the kidnappers, he said. The aircraft then pursued the captors further and a second firefight took place in which "several" of the kidnappers were killed and two French ground troops slightly injured, Burkhard said. A statement from defence chief Juppe on Saturday said: "At the end of the operation, the lifeless bodies of the two hostages were discovered."