A man who identified himself as Herve Gourdel sits in between two masked gunmen in this still image taken from video published on the Internet on Monday. The French national was kidnapped in eastern Algeria on Sunday, France's foreign ministry said.
AFP/Paris
France vowed on Tuesday it would not negotiate with jihadists who kidnapped a French hiker in Algeria, as the local army raced against time to find him before his threatened execution.
Algerian military planes were combing the mountainous eastern Tizi Ouzou region backed by elite anti-terrorist troops in a desperate bid to find 55-year-old Herve Gourdel, a security source said.
The kidnapping was claimed by Jund al-Khilifa (Soldiers of the Caliphate), a group linked to Islamic State jihadists that has vowed to kill the hostage by Tuesday night if Paris did not stop air strikes in Iraq.
As the deadline loomed, some 20 truckloads of paratroopers also joined the search, a witness said, and police set up roadblocks along the highway that works its way through the mountains.
France opened an official enquiry into the kidnapping, which took place on Sunday in the heart of Algeria's Djurdjura National Park, whose dense forests, deep gorges and picturesque lakes were once a key draw for tourists.
However, in the 1990s it became a sanctuary for Islamists who would later swear allegiance to Al-Qaeda, and security forces have been unable to dislodge them.
Jund al-Khilifa was formed recently after splintering from Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which experts say has raked in some $120 million (93 million euros) in ransom payments in the previous eight years.
Paris -- which has denied accusations it pays ransoms -- refused to be cowed by the threat against Gourdel, and Prime Minister Manuel Valls insisted the country would press on with air strikes alongside the United States.
Valls told French radio there would be "no discussion, no negotiation and we will never give in to blackmail. Even if we are, of course, very worried after the authentication of this video."
"If we give in, if we retreat an inch, we will be handing them victory," Valls told Europe 1 radio while on a visit to Germany.
The French government confirmed as authentic a video posted by the group showing the white-haired and bespectacled hostage squatting on the ground flanked by two hooded men clutching Kalashnikov assault rifles.
In a YouTube video posted on Monday night, Jund al-Khilifa threatened to kill Gourdel within 24 hours unless Paris halts its air strikes.
Gourdel lives in the southern French city of Nice and works as a mountain guide. He arrived in Algeria on Saturday and was seized a day later while hiking with Algerian friends.