The statement from al-Mourabitounes (the Sentinels) group was carried by al-Jazeera and said the assault was carried out with al-Qaida’s “Sahara emirate”.
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The attack on the hotel was claimed by jihadist group Al Mourabitoun and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and is the latest in a series of deadly raids this year in Mali, which has battled Islamist rebels based in its desert north for years.
The US Embassy tweeted that it was “aware of an ongoing active shooter operation at the Radisson Hotel”, and instructed its citizens to stay indoors.
It was not immediately clear which Muslim extremist groups might be behind the attack, which unfolded one week after the attacks on Paris that killed 129 people.
Obama administration officials would do well to refrain from making premature assessments about the vitality of both ISIS and al Qaeda for the foreseeable future.
“After the flight, 12 airline employees were having a pre-flight rest at the Radisson Blue hotel which was attacked by militants at 7.00 a.m. local time on November 20”, the company said.
Datar was a senior manager at Palladium Group, an global development organization with offices in Washington, her family said.
The attack appears to have had an immediate effect on the country’s tourism industry with one major hotel saying that it had received numerous cancellations, and that restaurant and business centre reservations were down. USA and French special forces assisted with the response. Diarra said he saw people getting shot and a few injured people being evacuated out of the hotel.
One guest said the attackers told him to recite verses from the Quran before he was released.
“Everything she did in her life she did to help others- as a mother, public health expert, daughter, sister and friend”.
China will step up cooperation with the worldwide community to fight terrorism, President Xi Jinping said, according to a statement on the foreign ministry’s website.
The area around the Radisson hotel is being sealed off by security forces as they try to assess the situation, an anonymous official told Reuters.
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The US military was providing airlift support and aerial reconnaissance support to French forces in Mali under a 2013 agreement, Africa Command said. Both China and Russian state media have reported that Chinese and Russian nationals are believed to have been killed.
