President: Mali will not shut down

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. “I can not call this even an export of ideology as it is an export of havoc”.

An Islamist group also claimed responsibility for the death of five people last March in an attack on a restaurant in Bamako that is popular with foreigners.

President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita has said that both gunmen involved in the attack were killed at the hotel were killed, although an eye witness had previously said there was at least one additional attacker.

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. Earlier the day, Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed that another four Chinese nationals, who had been held hostage, had been rescued.

Although the raid ended yesterday, officials admitted they were still hunting three terrorists thought to have been behind the attack.

President Vladimir Putin condemned the attack, which was claimed by the Al-Murabitoun group, an Al-Qaeda affiliate run by a notorious one-eyed Algerian militant.

The head of security at the Radisson Blu hotel, Seydou Dembele, told Reuters that breakfast at the hotel was disrupted on Friday when as many as 10 assailants burst into the building, shouted “Allahu Akbar”, and opened fire.

Friday’s assault came a week after militants killed 130 people in a spate of gun and bomb attacks in Paris claimed by Islamic State.

In August, they stormed a hotel in central Mali in August, killing at least 12 people in an attack similar to Friday’s.

The country was due to begin three days of mourning on Monday.

Guinean singer Sekouba Bambino Diabate, who was among the survivors, told AFP the gunmen spoke English among themselves.

The separatists and other analysts say, however, that it may have been an effort to derail Mali’s fragile recovery.

Sky’s Special Correspondent Alex Crawford said: “Room after room showed the desperate measures taken by those trapped in their hotel as they fought to stay alive, penned into a few of these rooms for about seven hours”.

France has more than 1000 troops in its former colony, a key battleground of the Barkhane counter-terror mission spanning five countries in Africa’s restive Sahel region.