ALGIERS, Algeria—Algeria recorded 115 kidnappings last year "relating to terrorism" or involving demands for ransom, the interior minister said Thursday in a rare public tally of abductions.
Speaking during a question session in Parliament, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni also said there were 260 kidnappings involving family disputes.
Kidnappings were frequent at the height of Algeria's Islamic insurgency in the 1990s but many went unreported.
The interior minister acknowledged that the actual number of kidnappings last year might have been higher, since many families don't report kidnappings to the authorities, especially those of children thought to have been abducted by pedophiles.
Zerhouni said new police teams were being put in place to warn children and adolescents about pedophiles and to treat kidnapping victims.
He did not give a breakdown of the nationalities of terrorism-related kidnappings.
Militants from the Algerian group al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa seized two Austrian tourists in neighboring Tunisia, saying they were kidnapped because of Western cooperation with Israel. Austrian diplomats have been working for weeks on gaining their release.
A predecessor Islamic movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, was believed responsible for kidnapping 32 European tourists in the Sahara in 2003. One died in captivity but the others were eventually let go.
Gas- and oil-rich Algeria has faced a resurgence of attacks by Islamic militants over the past year after a period of relative calm. As many as 200,000 people were killed in an insurgency triggered when the army canceled 1992 elections that an Islamic party was poised to win.
