text: A U.S. official says two more Americans were killed in the hostage standoff at a natural gas complex in Algeria, taking the final death toll of U.S. citizens to three. 
   
   Seven Americans made it out safely. 
   
   The official said Monday that the FBI had recovered the bodies of the Americans and notified their families. 
   
   The official had no details on how the Americans died. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter. ||||| ALGIERS Algeria's prime minister accused a Canadian of coordinating last week's raid on a desert gas plant and, praising the storming of the complex where 38 mostly foreign hostages were killed, he pledged to resist the rise of Islamists in the Sahara. 
   
   Algeria will never succumb to terrorism or allow al Qaeda to establish "Sahelistan", an Afghan-style power base in arid northwest Africa, Abdelmalek Sellal told a news conference in Algiers where he also said at least 37 foreign hostages died. 
   
   "There is clear political will," the prime minister said. 
   
   Claimed by an Algerian al Qaeda leader as a riposte to France's attack on his allies in neighboring Mali the previous week, the four-day siege drew global attention to Islamists in the Sahara and Sahel regions and brought promises of support to African governments from Western powers whose toppling of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi helped flood the region with weapons. 
   
   The attack on a valuable part of its vital energy industry raised questions about the security capacity of an establishment that took power from French colonists 50 years ago, held off a bloody Islamist insurgency in the 1990s and has avoided the democratic upheavals the Arab Spring brought to North Africa. 
   
   Sellal said a Canadian citizen whom he named only as Chedad, a surname found among Arabs in the region, was among 29 gunmen killed and added that he had "coordinated" the attack. Another three militants were taken alive and were in custody. 
   
   Among hostages confirmed dead by their own governments were three Americans, seven Japanese, six Filipinos and three Britons; others from Britain, Norway and elsewhere were listed as unaccounted for. Sellal said seven of the 37 foreign dead were unidentified, while a further five foreigners were missing. 
   
   Nearly 700 Algerians and 100 other foreigners survived. 
   
   An Algerian security source said investigators pursuing the possibility that the attackers had inside help to map the complex and gain entry were questioning at least two employees. 
   
   Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament in London that Britain would increase its help to Algeria's intelligence and security forces and might do more for France in Mali, though he ruled out sending many of its stretched armed forces to Africa. 
   
   Noting a shift in the source of threats to British interests from Afghanistan to Africa, he also noted Sellal's rundown of a multinational group of gunmen from across north and west Africa and said the region was becoming "a magnet for jihadists". 
   
   Alongside a "strong security response", however, he called for efforts to address long-standing grievances, such as poverty and political exclusion, which foster support for violence. Some militants in Algeria want autonomy for the south and complain of domination by an unchanging establishment in Algiers. 
   
   DEATH AND SURVIVAL 
   
   As Algerian forces combed the Tigantourine plant near the town of In Amenas for explosives and the missing, survivors and the bereaved told tales of terror, narrow escapes and of death. 
   
   "The terrorists lined up four hostages and assassinated them ... shot them in the head," a brother of Kenneth Whiteside told Sky News, in an account of the Briton's death given to the family by an Algerian colleague who witnessed it. "Kenny just smiled the whole way through. He'd accepted his fate." 
   
   Filipino survivor Joseph Balmaceda said gunmen used him for cover: "Whenever government troops tried to use a helicopter to shoot at the enemy, we were used as human shields." 
   
   Another Briton, Garry Barlow, called his wife from within the site before he was killed and said: "I'm sat here at my desk with Semtex strapped to my chest." 
   
   Several hostages died on Thursday when Algerian helicopters blasted jeeps in which the militants were trying to move them. 
   
   An Algerian security source had earlier told Reuters that documents found on the bodies of two militants had identified them as Canadians: "A Canadian was among the militants. He was coordinating the attack," Sellal said. 
   
   In Ottawa, Canada's foreign affairs department said it was seeking information. Security experts noted that some Canadian citizens had been involved with international militants before. 
   
   Officials have also named other militants in recent days as having leadership roles among the attackers. Veteran Islamist Mokhtar Belmokhtar claimed responsibility on behalf of al Qaeda. 
   
   In a video distributed on the Internet, the one-eyed veteran of Afghan wars of the 1980s, of Algeria's civil war and of the lucrative trans-Sahara cigarette smuggling trade, said: "We in al Qaeda announce this blessed operation." 
   
   Dressed in combat fatigues, Belmokhtar demanded an end to French attacks on Islamist fighters in Mali. 
   
   The jihadists had planned the attack two months ago in neighboring Mali, Sellal added. They had traveled from there through Niger and Libya, hence evading Algeria's strong security services, until close to In Amenas. Their aim, he said, had been to take foreign hostages to Mali, and they made a first attempt to take captives from a bus near the site early on Wednesday. 
   
   Normally producing 10 percent of Algeria's natural gas, the facility was shut down during the incident. The government said it aimed to reopen it this week, although officials at Britain's BP and Norway's Statoil, which operate the plant with Algeria's state energy firm, said the plans were not clear. 
   
   MALI CONFLICT 
   
   An Algerian newspaper said the jihadists had arrived in cars painted in the colors of Algerian state energy firm Sonatrach but registered in Libya, a country awash with weaponry since Western powers backed a revolt to oust Gaddafi in 2011. 
   
   Using his oil wealth, the Libyan dictator exercised a degree of influence in the region and the consequences of his death are still unfolding. 
   
   In a sign of the complexities wrought by the Arab Spring revolts, Egypt, a former military dictatorship now led by one of the generals' Islamist foes, criticized France's intervention in Mali on Monday. President Mohamed Mursi called instead for more spending to address rebels' grievances and warned that the military moves would "inflame the conflict in this region". 
   
   The bloodshed also increased the strains in Algeria's long fraught relations with Western powers, where some complained about being left in the dark while the decision to storm the compound was being taken. 
   
   But this week, Britain and France both defended the military action by Algeria, the strongest military power in the Sahara and an ally the West needs in combating the militants. 
   
   Chafik Mesbah, a former Algerian presidential security adviser, said: "The West did not criticize Algeria because it knows an assault was inevitable in the circumstances ... The victims were a minimum price to pay to solve the crisis." 
   
   (Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Mark Heinrich) ||||| The debate over how the Algerians handled one of the worst hostage-taking episodes in recent memory reflects conflicting ideas over how to manage such mass abductions in an age of suicidal terrorist acts in a post-9/11 world. 
   
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   The Algerians — and some Western supporters — argue that the loss of innocent lives is unavoidable when confronting fanatics who will kill their captives anyway, while others say modern technology provides some means of minimizing the deaths. 
   
   At a news conference in Algiers, the prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, portrayed the military’s deadly assaults on the Islamist militants who had stormed and occupied an internationally run gas-producing complex last Wednesday in remote eastern Algeria as a matter of national character and pride. 
   
   “The whole world has understood that the reaction was courageous,” Mr. Sellal said, calling the abductions an attack “on the stability of Algeria.” 
   
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   “Algerians are not people who sell themselves out,” he said. “When the security of the country is at stake, there is no possible discussion.” 
   
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   It was the Algerian government’s first detailed public explanation of its actions during the siege, a brazen militant assault that has raised broad new concerns about the strength of extremists who have carved out enclaves in neighboring Mali and elsewhere in North Africa. 
   
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   Mr. Sellal said that the 37 foreign workers killed during the episode — a toll much higher than the 23 previously estimated — came from eight countries and that five captives remained unaccounted for. It was unclear how many had died at the hands of the kidnappers or the Algerian Army. The United States said that three Americans were among the dead and that seven had survived. 
   
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   The prime minister also said that 29 kidnappers had been killed, including the leader, and that three had been captured alive. The militants were from Egypt, Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Tunisia and Canada, he said — an assertion the Canadian government said it was investigating. Mr. Sellal said the group began the plot in Mali and entered Algeria through Libya, close to the site. 
   
   Other countries, notably Japan and Britain, have raised concerns about what they considered Algeria’s harsh and hasty response. The United States has not publicly criticized Algeria, which it regards as an ally in the fight to contain jihadist groups in Africa. But law enforcement and military officials said Monday that they almost certainly would have handled such a crisis differently. 
   
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   First, the United States would have engaged in longer discussions with the captors to identify the leaders and buy time, the officials said. In the meantime, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and possibly allied security services could have moved surveillance drones, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and electronic eavesdropping equipment into place to help identify the locations of the hostages and the assailants. 
   
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   “It would have been a precision approach as opposed to a sledgehammer approach,” said Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, a retired deputy commander of the United States military’s Special Operations Command. 
   
   A senior American official said the Algerians had allowed an unarmed American surveillance drone to fly over the gas field on Thursday. But it was unclear what role, if any, it had played in the Algerian Army’s assault that day. American officials said they had not been told of the strike in advance. 
   
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   Prime Minister Sellal conceded no mistakes as he provided the government’s first distinct timeline in the sequence of events, breaking it down into three episodes. 
   
   First, the militants attacked a guarded bus carrying foreign plant workers to the airport at In Amenas, and two people aboard were killed. “They wanted to take control of this bus and take the foreign workers directly to northern Mali so they could have hostages, to negotiate with foreign countries,” he said. “But when they opened fire on the bus, there was a strong response from the gendarmes guarding it.” 
   
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   After they failed to capture the bus, the prime minister said, the militants split into two groups: one to seize the complex’s living quarters, the other to capture the gas plant itself, a maze of pipes and machinery. They invaded both sections, taking dozens of hostages, attaching bombs to some and booby-trapping the plant. 
   
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   At this point, he said, the facility was ringed by security forces. 
   
   Perhaps late Wednesday or early Thursday morning — Mr. Sellal described it as a nighttime episode — the kidnappers attempted a breakout. “They put explosives on the hostages. They wanted to put the hostages in four-wheel-drive vehicles and take them to Mali.” 
   
   Mr. Sellal then suggested that government helicopters immobilized the kidnappers. Witnesses have described an intense army assault, resulting in both militant and hostage deaths. 
   
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   “A great number of workers were put in the cars; they wanted to use them as human shields,” the prime minister said. “There was a strong response from the army, and three cars exploded,” he said. One contained an Algerian militant whom the prime minister identified as the leader, Mohamed-Lamine Bouchneb. 
   
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   The second and final operation happened Saturday, Mr. Sellal said, when the 11 remaining kidnappers moved into the gas-producing part of the complex, a hazardous area that he said they had already tried to ignite. 
   
   Photo 
   
   “The aim of the terrorists was to explode the gas compound,” he said. In this second assault, he said, there were “a great number of hostages,” and the kidnappers were ordered to kill them all. It was then, he said, that army snipers killed the kidnappers. 
   
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   None of the Algerian reporters questioned the prime minister’s version of events, and some spoke of a disconnect between foreign complaints about the way Algeria had managed the crisis and Algeria’s protracted struggle with Islamic militancy over the past three decades. 
   
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   “The terrorists came with a precise plan: Kidnap foreigners and destroy the gas plant,” said Hamid Guemache, a journalist at TSA-Tout sur l’Algérie, an online news site, dismissing criticism of the government. “Did it really have a choice? If the assault hadn’t been undertaken quickly, maybe the terrorists would have succeeded in killing all the hostages, and blowing up the factory.” 
   
   Some American counterterrorism officials conceded that point. 
   
   “If the terrorists were shooting hostages or at least putting explosives around their necks and their intent was to sabotage the plant, this might have been a suicide mission to blow up the plant, and not negotiate,” said Henry A. Crumpton, a retired career C.I.A. officer and formerly the State Department’s top counterterrorism official. 
   
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   “It sounds horrible to say, but given the number of hostages and scope of this, this is not as bad an outcome as what could have happened, if that was their intent.” 
   
   In all, 790 workers were on the site — including 134 foreigners of 26 nationalities — when it was first seized, the prime minister said. 
   
   From the start of the siege, the Algerians were bound to respond with force, said Mansouria Mokhefi, a professor who heads the Middle East and Maghreb program at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. The question, she said, was how bloody the outcome would be. 
   
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   “Everyone knows the Algerians do not negotiate,” Dr. Mokhefi said, and surely the attackers knew this as well. 
   
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   After all, she said, the foundation of the Algerian government is its longstanding defeat of Islamist militancy and its restoration of a “certain peace” to the country after the civil war during the 1990s, when tens of thousands died. 
   
   “The legitimacy of this government in Algeria is its fight against terrorism and the security of the country,” Dr. Mokhefi said. 
   
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   Criticizing the Algerians for their harsh tactics, as the British and Japanese have done, simply shows “a deep lack of knowledge about this regime, of its functioning,” she said. 
   
   But the French understand the Algerians, Dr. Mokhefi said. 
   
   French officials have publicly supported Algeria’s actions, in part because France needs to use Algerian airspace for its military intervention in Mali and wants Algeria to work harder to seal its borders with Mali. 
   
   “There isn’t a military unit that would have done better, given the strategic conditions, the place where this unfolded, the number of assailants and the number of hostages,” said Christian Prouteau, who was chief of security under President François Mitterrand. “I challenge any Western country confronting this kind of operation to do better.”
target: – The hostages weren't the only Westerners involved in the Sahara gas plant crisis, according to Algerian authorities. Security sources say two Canadian Islamists were among the attackers found dead after the crisis came to a bloody end, Reuters reports. Authorities say the militants, who claimed the attack on behalf of al-Qaeda, included people from other African and Arab countries. At least 37 foreign hostages, hailing from eight different countries, died during the raid, Algeria's prime minister announced today, according to the New York Times. Five more remain unaccounted for. Among the dead are at least two Americans, the AP reports; seven other Americans made it to safety. Twenty-nine militants were also killed in the attack.