The Radisson Blu hotel attacked by two gunmen on Friday was preparing to host a meeting on implementing the latest accords.
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Three separate groups have claimed responsibility for the attack. Keita said two attackers had been killed.
A New York Times report on Sunday indicated that the Al Mourabitoun Islamist extremist group had been working under the guidance of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian operative for Al-Qaeda.
Keita said that Mali will not shut down just as Paris and NY did not close down after 9/11 and the deadly storm of attacks respectively.
Mohammed Coulibaly said on Saturday that he had been in the kitchen cooking when a waitress ran in to say they were under attack. Salif Traore said Saturday that 21 people were confirmed dead so far, among them 18 hotel guests of the hotel, two terrorists and a Malian gendarme.
In addition to an American public health worker murdered in a terrorist raid on a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital on Friday, the 19 dead included six Russians, three Chinese, two Belgians and an Israeli national. There were dozens of people trapped inside the hotel for hours until Malian and United Nations security forces surrounded the hotel and rushed in. Keita is due to visit the site of the carnage today as Mali prepares to begin three days of national mourning on Monday.
Former Tuareg separatists, who allied with Islamist armed groups to take over the north of Mali in 2012 but have accepted a peace deal with the government, condemned the attack.
Security remains tight around major hotels in Bamako. The area remains vulnerable to attacks despite a military operation led by France in 2013, which came after the UN Security Council passed a resolution on the deployment of a peacekeeping force known as the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).
6 staff members of Russian regional airline Volga-Dnepr were killed, Russia’s global ministry said, while 6 others were rescued.
Guinean singer Sekouba Bambino Diabate, who was among the survivors, told reporters the gunmen spoke English among themselves.
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The group was also responsible for a shooting attack on a restaurant popular with foreigners in Bamako on March 7 this year, which killed five people and wounded nine others.
