Algeria Appears to be Over.

At around 16:00 GMT on Saturday the Algerian government declared the hostage situation at the In Amenas natural gas plant to be over. Mind you they made the same declaration at around 16:00 on Friday and at around 16:00 on Thursday.

Quite apart from the fact that the Algerians only appeared to be working on this between the hours of 9 and 5 the main problem has been the sheer size of the In Amenas plant. The site itself covers an area of 64km^2 and is made up of an accommodation block roughly 1.6km^2 in size, 1.6km on from that there is a security block roughly 3km^2 in size, roughly 1km on from that there is a warehouse/factory block 16km^2 in size and next to that there is the actual gas processing facility that's around 38km^2 in size. This facility actually serves five gas fields covering an area of 10,000km^2. So saying that hostages have been taken at In Amenas is a bit like saying hostages have been taken somewhere in Scotland. The facility was attacked by a force of less then 100 men which is nowhere near enough to dominate an area of that size and complexity. So when the initial attack took place the vast majority of the some 600 staff on site simply hid or ran off into the desert. The attackers focused on taking westerners hostage and split them up into small groups before moving them around within in the facility. Therefore the largest part of the operation has been locating staff who were hiding either within the facility or in the surrounding desert rather then fighting with hostage takers.

This problem was compounded by the Algerian government treating the situation as their moment in the spotlight. Therefore they have been very tightly controlling the flow of information in order to hook all the nations with nationals amongst the hostages into a very long a complex negotiation with the situation very much being used as a metaphor for the situation in Mali. On top of that the US and the UK have been using the situation to have coded discussions about their issues such as the EU and Mali. That's because while successful hostage rescues are celebrated and quickly forgotten failed operations lead years of inquiry, recrimination and argument. For example I'm pretty sure the UK and Australia are still arguing about Gallopi. Japan in particular seem to be innocent bystanders caught up in the middle of all this.

Also Britain is now treating the renowned tobacco and drug smuggler Mokhtar Belmokhtar who is believed to be behind the attack as public enemy number 1 with rumours that the SAS have already been deployed to hunt him down and kill him. This is no surprise because the last thing Britain wants is for someone else to capture and question him in case he reveals how much BP paid him to stage all this.

And oh look the African Cup of Nations has just begun. It's Mali today and Algeria on Tuesday.

16:05 on 20/1/13.