The bloodshed at the Radisson Blu resort in Mali, a previous French colony, evoked the problems French troops as well as United Nations peacekeepers encounter in recovering protection and order in a West African state that has fought rebels and also militants in its weakly-governed desert north for many years.
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In an audio recording broadcast by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television, Belmokhtar’s group claimed responsibility.
“Mali will not shut down because of this attack”. The exact number of gunmen involved in the attack is unknown, with initial reports ranging from two to more than a dozen.
The Chinese state news agency Xinhua said several Chinese tourists were among those trapped inside the building. Witnesses said attackers began shooting people nearly as soon as they entered the Radisson, starting with a security guard at the entrance to the lobby.
Malian security forces were hunting “more than three” suspects after a brazen assault on a luxury hotel in the capital that killed 20 people plus two assailants, an army commander said Saturday.
Three Chinese, Zhou Tianxiang and Wang Xuanshang and Chang Xuehui were executives from the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp, the company said in a statement on its website.
Twelve Air France flight crew were in the hotel, but all were extracted safely, the French national carrier said.
The hotel was being guarded by national police yesterday, said Sergeant Idrissa Berthe, one of the officers posted at the scene which was still strewn with broken glass from shot out windows.
“I heard them say in English “Did you load it?’, “Let’s go”, Sékouba ‘Bambino” Diabate told Reuters.
“We are following several lines, but we won’t be making a statement”, the police source told reporters. Six others have been rescued, it added.
In 2012, Tuareg separatists and Islamic extremists took northern Mali in a military coup.
“This is just the beginning”. We have offices from the field engineers regiment and from the Airforce as part of the municipal operation in Mali but they were nowhere near the hotel so far as we know, the information we have to date, we do not have Ghanaian victims.
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“The bitterness from Mali, the arrogance of the French, will not be forgotten at all”, he said.
