French and USA military personnel backed up Burkina Faso security forces when they launched their operation to reclaim the Splendid Hotel in the early hours of Saturday.
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The man was doing volunteer work, Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said in a statement late on Saturday.
The announcement came from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and there were apparently four jihadist attackers, who are linked to Al Qaida, that stormed a luxury hotel and were later killed by Burkina Faso and French security forces.
Burkina Faso elected Roch Marc Christian Kabore as its new president in a historic vote in November, becoming the West African country’s first new leader in decades.
Ken Elliot and his wife Jocelyn are believed to have been abducted following an attack on the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou on Friday that killed 28 people.
“We could hear them talking and they were walking around and kept shooting at people who seemed alive”, Sawadogo told CNN affiliate BFMTV.
And just hours before Friday’s assault on the Splendid Hotel, two people, a gendarme and a civilian, were killed when a convoy of gendarmes was attacked near Burkina Faso’s border with Mali.
The attempt to retake the hotel was reported on Twitter by Gilles Thibault, the French ambassador to Burkina Faso.
Others killed in the terror attack included French, Canadian and Ukrainian nationals.
Three attackers were killed at the hotel and a fourth was killed when security forces cleared out a second hotel nearby.
A spokesman for Malian militant group Ansar Dine, Hamadou Ag Khallini, said in a brief phone message the couple were being held by jihadists from Emirate of the Sahara.
Burkina Faso hosts French special forces and serves as an important ally of France and the United States in the fight against Islamist militants in west Africa.
Terrorists have kidnapped an Australian doctor and his wife in the west African country of Burkina Faso.
The same group who claimed responsibility for this attack also took credit for a very similar attack on a hotel in Mali last November that left at least 22 people dead.
“These truly barbaric criminal acts carried out against innocent people, claimed by the criminal organization al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) seek to destabilize our country and its republican institutions, and to undermine efforts to build a democratic, quiet and prosperous nation”, said Kabore.
Despite the unrest, the country has until now remained free of Islamic terrorist attacks.
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The landlocked country has endured political unrest since October 2014, when protesters marched against then-President Blaise Compaore, who appeared ready to amend the constitution and extend his 27-year rule. “They got it wrong”.
