WASHINGTON: The United States yesterday blacklisted a shadowy Al Qaeda breakaway faction behind the bloody siege of an Algerian gas plant, and the leader of a Palestinian group fighting for Islamists in Syria.
The Signatories in Blood, an armed unit founded by the one-eyed Mokhtar Belmokhtar last year when he split from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, was designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the State Department.
The group “claimed responsibility for the January 2013 attack against a gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria,” the department said in a statement.AFP
