BAMAKO (Reuters) -
Around 27 people were reported dead on Friday after Malian commandos stormed a
hotel seized by Islamist gunmen to rescue 170 people, many of them foreigners,
trapped in the building.
The jihadist group Al
Mourabitoun, which is based in the desert north of the former French colony,
claimed responsibility for the attack and said it worked with al Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb. Mali has been battling Islamist rebels for years.
A security source said
the siege was over by around 4 p.m. local time (1630 GMT) and two militants
were dead.
A United Nations
official said U.N. peacekeepers searching the hotel had made a preliminary
count of 27 bodies. The government held an emergency cabinet meeting on Friday
night and was expected to give an official death toll later.
"At first I thought
it was a carjacking. Then they killed two guards in front of me and shot
another man in the stomach and wounded him and I knew it was something
more," said Modi Coulibaly, a Malian legal expert who saw the assault start.
State television showed
troops brandishing AK47s in the lobby of the Radisson Blu, one of the capital
Bamako's smartest hotels and beloved of foreigners. A body lay under a brown
blanket at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
Peacekeepers saw 12 dead
bodies in the basement of the hotel and another 15 on the second floor, the
U.N. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. He added that the U.N.
troops were still helping Malian authorities search the hotel.
The U.S. State
Department said one American had been killed. Earlier, the White House said it
was working to locate all Americans in Mali, and it offered to help with an
investigation and urged its citizens to limit their movements around Bamako.
A man who worked for a
Belgian regional parliament was also among the dead, the assembly said.
France's Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said he was not aware of any
French nationals killed.
Minister of Internal
Security Colonel Salif Traoré said the gunmen burst through a security barrier
at 7 a.m. (0700 GMT), spraying the area with gunfire and shouting "Allahu
Akbar", or "God is great" in Arabic.
The attacks are a slap
in the face for France, which has stationed 3,500 troops in northern Mali to
try to restore stability after a 2012 Tuareg rebellion which was later hijacked
by al Qaeda-linked jihadists.
They also put a
spotlight back on veteran militant leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar months after he
was reported killed.
BURSTS OF GUNFIRE
Bursts of gunfire were
heard as the assailants went through the hotel room by room and floor by floor,
one senior security source and a witness told Reuters.
Some people were freed
by the attackers after showing they could recite verses from the Koran, while
others managed to escape or were brought out by security forces.
One of the rescued
hostages, celebrated Guinean singer Sékouba "Bambino" Diabate, said
he had overheard two of the assailants speaking English as they searched an
adjacent room.
"We heard shots
coming from the reception area. I didn't dare go out of my room because it felt
like this wasn't just simple pistols - these were shots from military
weapons," Diabate told Reuters by phone.
"The attackers went
into the room next to mine. I stayed still, hidden under the bed, not making a
noise," he said. "I heard them say in English 'Did you load it?',
'Let's go'."
The raid on the hotel,
which lies just west of the city centre near government ministries and
diplomatic offices, came a week after Islamic State militants killed 130 people
in Paris.
Twelve Air France flight
crew members were in the hotel but all were brought out safely, the French
national carrier said.
A Turkish official said
five of seven Turkish Airlines staff had also managed to flee. The Chinese
state news agency Xinhua said three Chinese citizens had been killed in the
attack.
PRESIDENT RETURNS
Malian President Ibrahim
Boubacar Keita cut short a trip to a regional summit in Chad, his office said.
Northern Mali was
occupied by Islamist fighters, some with links to al Qaeda, for most of 2012.
They were driven out by a French-led military operation, but sporadic violence
has continued in Mali's central belt on the southern reaches of the Sahara, and
in Bamako.
One security source said
as many as 10 gunmen had stormed the building, although the company that runs
the hotel, Rezidor Group, said it understood that there were only two
attackers.
Al Mourabitoun has
claimed responsibility for a number of attacks, including an assault on a hotel
in the town of Sevare, 600 km (375 miles) northeast of Bamako, in August in
which 17 people including five U.N. staff were killed.
One of its leaders is
Belmokhtar, blamed for a large-scale assault on an Algerian gas field in 2013
and a major figure in insurgencies across North Africa.
In the wake of last
week's Paris attacks, an Islamic State militant in Syria told Reuters the
organisation viewed France's military intervention in Mali as another reason to
attack France and French interests.
"This is just the
beginning. We also haven't forgotten what happened in Mali," said the
non-Syrian fighter, who was contacted online by Reuters. "The bitterness
from Mali, the arrogance of the French, will not be forgotten at all."
(Reporting by Tiemoko
Diallo; Additional reporting by Adama Diarra, Joe Penney and Kissima Diagana in
Bamako, Makini Brice in Dakar, John Irish in Paris, Washington and United
Nations bureaus; Writing by Joe Bavier and Ed Cropley; Editing by Matthew Mpoke
Bigg, Andrew Roche, Toni Reinhold).
