Aust couple kidnapped after Burkina Faso attack

“We have received around 15 wounded people”.

British nationals are being told to avoid the area around a luxury hotel in the capital of Burkina Faso where a siege left 26 dead and 56 injured.

Washington condemned the attack and said the U.S. Embassy in Ouagadougou was “making every effort to account for U.S. citizens in the city”.

It was not clear whether the attackers’ deaths were included in the 23 killed, but the French Foreign Ministry told CNN that 27 people died in all.

President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, who took office in December, visited the hotel on Saturday but made no immediate comment.

“These ongoing attacks are proof that decisive action is required to confront this threat, including fully supporting our coalition allies and keeping our CF-18s in the fight in Iraq and Syria”, Ambrose said in a statement.

Bodies of three of the jihadist attackers have been identified with a major rescue search also underway for survived hostages. By Saturday morning, security forces had killed four attackers, the Associated Press reports.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed responsibility for the attack, according to US-based monitoring group SITE.

AQIM said the gunmen were from the Al-Murabitoun group of notorious Algerian extremist Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

Commandos later used explosives to storm the 147-room hotel as other security forces tried to remove casualties. The reports were also relayed by AFP.

Another witness reported seeing four assailants.

The Splendid Hotel is under attack in Burkina Faso.

“It was disgusting… there was blood everywhere”.

Robert Sangare, the head of Yalgado Ouedraogo hospital in the city, told the AFP news agency that one European patient said the gunmen appeared to target white people.

French President Francois Hollande denounced the “odious and cowardly attack”, with the European Union and Britain issuing similar condemnations.

The Australian doctor and his wife were abducted in Djibo, the capital of the northern Soum province, Compaore said.

A spokesman for Malian militant group Ansar Dine, Hamadou Ag Khallini, told AFP in a brief phone message that the couple were being held by jihadists from the Al-Qaeda-linked “Emirate of the Sahara”.

“The commonest things we would do I suppose are hernias, bladder stones, we do all sorts of tumors – you name it, we do it because there’s nowhere else to do it”, he said.

Burkina Faso is a largely Muslim country though it is home to a number of French nationals as a former colony of France.

“The elections went off well…”

“There have been warning signs and if there is an element of surprise it is that this did not come earlier”, said Cynthia Ohayon, West Africa analyst at International Crisis Group.

But the landlocked country has been largely spared violence by Islamist militants who have staged attacks in neighbouring Mali.

A Romanian security officer was kidnapped while working for a mining company in Tambao in April and three members of Burkina Faso’s gendarmerie were killed in another attack along the border in October.