Dozens of hostages managed to escape the early morning raid, but 138 people were trapped in the besieged Radisson Blu hotel in the Malian capital Bamako and the security ministry said at least three people had been killed.
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“Everything is being done to follow the tracks” of the suspects, the source said, declining to give further details to avoid compromising the investigation.
Shortly after the shooting started, a US special forces soldier in town for a United Nations peacekeeping conference rushed to help Malian troops move the escapees to safety, officials said.
“Then they killed two guards in front of me and shot another man in the stomach and wounded him, and I knew it was something more“, said Malian legal expert Modi Coulibaly, who witnessed the attack begin, reported Reuters news agency.
At least three attackers died including one who blew himself up, Radio France global reported.
Within three hours around 80 hostages were freed as Malian and United States special forces prepared to storm the building. An al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, the al-Shabab, used a similar method in 2013 during an attack in Nairobi. The French and USA embassies confirmed that the attack was under way. The 190-room hotel, located near government ministries and diplomatic offices, is popular among foreigners in the former French colony.
Al-Mourabitoun, an extremist group which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State (Isis), claimed to have carried out the attack, as did al-Qaida in the Maghreb, but there was no official confirmation. The group was responsible for an attack on a hotel in central Mali in August. However, a senior security source put the number of gunmen in the hotel at 10, Reuters reported. Five U.S. Pentagon personnel were at the hotel at the time of the siege, but all have been accounted for, according to a defense official.
One of the freed hostages, a singer from Guinea, said he heard attackers in the next room speaking English.
US citizens might be at the hotel, according to a statement from State Department spokesperson John Kirby, adding that the U.S. Embassy in Bamako is working to verify.
Radisson Blu Hotel, in Bamako, Mail, where the hostage crisis is taking place. The horrific terror attacks comes just a few days after ISIS gunmen massacred 129 people on the streets of Paris.
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Northern Mali was occupied by Islamist fighters, a few with links to al Qaeda, for most of 2012.
