It’s still playing an active military role there although it is up to Malian forces to react first to any situation. “They were firing inside the hotel, in the corridors”, Diabate said.
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Malian authorities are hunting for the assailants in an attack that killed 19 hostages at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako on Friday.
“On November 21, identification procedures were carried out with assistance of the Russian embassy to Mali and the deaths of six crew members of the Volga-Dnepr airline were confirmed”, it said.
Russian citizens were among those killed in an attack on a top hotel in the capital of Mali on Friday, the RIA news agency reported on Saturday, citing Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita announced the 10-day nationwide state of emergency beginning at midnight. Keita said two attackers had been killed.
Security officials who have said they were searching for three people immediately, after the assault on Sunday said two were dead. But Mali has faced repeated attacks from militants affiliated with al-Qaeda and other factions.
In its condemnation of the attack, the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation linked the attack to the negotiations, saying its goal was to “destabilize Mali and destroy the peace process”.
One American and a deputy from a regional parliament in Belgium were also killed in the Bamako hotel attack, though French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said he was not aware of any French nationals killed.
Aid worker Anita Datar had been working in the city as a United States envoy when up to ten gunmen stormed the hotel and opened fire with machine guns on Friday morning.
Mali had been considered a beacon of African democracy and western counterterrorism for several years, until the Tuareg rebels took control of northern Mali in 2012.
The Mali raid came a week after Islamic State militants killed 129 people in a series of shootings and explosions in Paris, the worst atrocity in Europe in nearly a decade. The militants were largely ousted by a French-led military operation the next year, but large parts of Mali remain lawless.
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Malian special forces assisted by USA and French forces fought their way through the hotel, finally ending the siege by killing at least two of the gunmen.
