US News

Survivors’ harrowing tales of Sahara siege

American survivors of the al Qaeda seizure of an Algerian gas plant were certain they were going to die and still have nightmares about their narrow escape in the Sahara Desert.

Mark Cobb, a BP manager, told “60 Minutes” he was in his office in the vast facility when terrorists attacked with heavy arms fire last month.

Cobb hid under a pile of maps in a locked room. “If they started poking at the maps with an AK-47 or peeling maps off the top,” he said, “I knew it was over.”

The heavily armed militants captured the plant and began searching for Americans and other Westerners to hold captive.

“I heard them kick open the front door. That’s I guess at the point, in all honesty, that I felt pure terror,” Cobb said. “I elected to begin to make calls to my family and say my goodbyes.”

Cobb, oil and gas expert Steve Wysocki and petroleum engineer Nick Frazier were among the five Americans to survive the attack and described it in the interviews airing Sunday.

Their ordeal began Jan. 16 when terrorists in pickup trucks from Mali raided the complex about 30 miles from the Libyan border, seized as many foreigners as they could and began planting explosives throughout the facility.

A one-eyed smuggler and bandit leader, Moktar Belmoktar, claimed responsibility for the al Qaeda-linked terror group.

Wysocki said he hid silently in his cubicle during the initial onslaught and heard the terrorist find his boss, Gordon Rowan of Mesa, Ariz., who was among the 37 foreign workers killed.

Wysocki said he feels guilty that he survived and others didn’t. “I’m like, ‘Why couldn’t I have done something to help?’ ” he said.

He said he felt “guilty that I was paralyzed with fear and not do[ing] anything.”

Wysocki and Cobb both escaped by running to a fence surrounding the natural gas plant and finding a hole that led to freedom and safety.

Cobb lucked out because his hiding spot was one of only two doors that the attackers failed to kick in.

He said he waited until he felt it was safe to make a break for it, got past the fence and ran through the desert to an Algerian Army base a half-mile away.

But he can’t escape memories of how close the terrorists came to finding him.

“The nightmares for me are all the same thing,” he told interviewer Charlie Rose. “It’s the sound of those footsteps as they came down the hallways towards that door.”

Frazier, the third survivor, was on a bus leaving the gas facility when bullets ripped through the windows. He dove for the floor and was surprised by how he and his colleagues reacted.

“It was very silent, very organized. It was as if we had trained for it — but we hadn’t,” he said.

The bullets kept coming, hitting the side of the bus. “It wasn’t just one, two, three bullets. It was . . . hundreds,” he said.

“I texted my wife: The bus is under attack. Call the embassy. This is real. Do not call me.”

But the Algerian Army arrived and began a 30-minute gun battle that kept the terrorists from boarding the bus. The soldiers turned back another attack by the terrorists before they got the bus passengers to safety.

“They saved our lives,” Frazier said.

The terrorists held parts of the complex for four more days until hunted down by Algerian government forces.