AYACUCHO, Peru - Gunmen seized 60 people, including eight foreigners, in a predawn raid on their pipeline construction camp in the Peruvian Andes, the defense minister said.
Army troops have been sent to the area and "the government has taken the necessary measures to liberate the kidnapped people," said Defense Minister Aurelio Loret de Mola, reading from a statement late Monday.
Police said earlier that they believed the attackers were members of the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group. But Loret de Mola only described them as "armed criminals" without elaborating further or providing details of the rescue.
The Argentine petroleum company Techint has been using the camp near Toccate, 220 miles southeast of Lima, to build a section of pipeline to carry natural gas from Peru's Amazon jungle across the Andes to the Pacific coast.
Omar Quesada, the top official in the region, said the attackers had seized 2,700 sticks of dynamite and had demanded a $1 million ransom as well as communications equipment.
NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania - Mauritania's president said a coup against him by disgruntled military officers had been crushed as hundreds of his supporters celebrated in the streets of the West African nation's capital.
In a nationally televised speech Monday, President Maaouya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya, unseen by the public since the fighting began two days earlier, thanked soldiers who remained loyal to him.
Earlier, military officials said that coup forces had taken an armored division based in a southern suburb in an effort to oust Mauritania's pro-Western government.