Malian authorities on hunt for hotel assailants

The latest on the attack on a hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako.

It was announced officially earlier on Saturday that six employees of the Volga-Dnepr airline, which is based in Ulyanovsk, were killed in a terrorist attack on a hotel in Bamako on November 20.

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.

In a message sent on Saturday to Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, Putin expressed his condolences and said “the widest worldwide cooperation” was needed to confront “global terrorism”.

“Mali will never be alone”, Mr Sall said. Al-Mourabitoun and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) also had claimed responsibility.

Mali says investigators are following “several leads” after the attack on a luxury hotel which was claimed by three Islamist militant groups.

The assault occurred on the eve of peace negotiations between Keita’s government and a coalition of northern Mali separatists who have been fighting over control of large sections of the country for two years.

The attack appears to have had an immediate effect in the country’s tourism industry with one major hotel saying that it had received numerous cancellations since the events of Friday, and that restaurant and business centre reservations were down.

On Friday morning, heavily armed assailants shouting “God is great!” in Arabic burst into the complex and opened fire on guards before seizing dozens of hostages at the hotel popular with foreigners, sparking a more than seven-hour siege by Malian troops backed by US and French special forces. Malian Army Major Modibo Nama Traore told the AP Sunday that security forces are looking for “more than three” people connected to the attacks.

Footage has emerged from inside the hotel in Mali where jihadis launched a deadly attack on Friday.

A Malian security source has told reporters that the authorities are actively pursuing at least three people over the attack in the former French colony.

The Telegraph reported that witnesses heard the gunmen screaming “Allahu Akbar” and that the attackers were releasing hostages who were able to recite verses from the Quran, the central book of Islam. The incident came after the extremist fighters, who had staged a military coup in Bamako, were dispersed and driven out of towns by a 2013 French-led military offensive.