“Terror will not win” and “long live Mali, terrorism shall not pass”, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said in a televised address, revising an earlier death toll to 21. “I can not call this even an export of ideology as it is an export of havoc”. The group’s statement said attacks would continue until the government ended its “aggression against our people in the north and the center of Mali”.
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In a Twitter message seen Saturday, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al Mourabitoun said their fighters had seized the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako in an attempt to force Mali’s government to release their prisoners. All the victims are residents of the Russian Ulyanovsk region located in the mid-Volga area, a few 880 kilometres (547 miles) southeast of Moscow. “The attack was targeting the peace agreement”, said Sidi Brahim Ould Sidati, a representative of the Coordination of Azawad Movements, representing groups seeking autonomy, according to the Associated Press.
Several people have been killed after multiple gunmen attacked a hotel in Mali’s capital city of Bamako Friday, CNN reported.
An Al-Qaeda affiliates group, the Al-Murabitoun, led by the notorious one-eyed Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, also known as the “Uncatchable” or “Mr Marlboro”, have since claimed the attack.
Most of the hotel guests and staff were freed hours later when Malian special forces, French special forces and off-duty U.S. servicemen stormed the hotel to end the siege. At least one guest reported the attackers instructed him to recite verses from the Quran as proof of his Muslim faith before he was allowed to leave.
A senior security source said the gunmen had burst into Radisson Blu hotel at 7 a.m. (0700 GMT), firing and shouting “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is great” in Arabic, and begun working their way through the building, room by room and floor by floor.
Guinean singer Sekouba Bambino Diabate, who was among the survivors, told AFP the gunmen spoke English among themselves. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs also confirmed Saturday that three Chinese nationals were among the dead, and that four other Chinese citizens had been rescued.
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“Our forces have courageously managed to limit and neutralise the threat from these fanatics who were fiercely determined to carry out a complete and utter massacre of everything that showed signs of life at the hotel”, he said. Mali is a former French colony.
