Malian President confirms 21 killed in hotel siege

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita announced a 10-day state of emergency Friday but said the country would not close its borders.

Jihadist group al-Mourabitoun says it is behind the attacks, and that it conducted the operation along with another al-Qaida affiliate, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, according to government officials and the jihadist monitor SITE Intelligence.

Security forces conducted room-by-room searches amid sporadic gunfire, news reports said.

Zakharova said six other Russians had been rescued.

A Malian police officer walks in front of the Radisson hotel in Bamako, Mali, November 20, 2015.

On Sunday, the Massina Liberation Front, which has been blamed for previous attacks in southern Mali, became the third group to claim responsibility for the siege.

At least three suspects are thought to be on the run.

“Among the many foreigners captured as hostages there were citizens of Russian Federation – employees of the airline Volga-Dnepr”, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement. The president declared a nationwide state of emergency, China’s Xinhua News Agency reported, without saying where it got the information.

A senior security source said some of the hostages had been freed after being made to recite verses from the Koran.

The attack may have been motivated by a desire to disrupt a fragile local peace process that has made progress in recent months, Jean-Herve Jezequel, an analyst for the global Crisis Group, said in an interview posted to the group’s website Friday night.

“Our forces have courageously managed to limit and neutralise the threat from these fanatics who were fiercely determined to carry out a complete and utter massacre of everything that showed signs of life at the hotel”, he said. Five of the dead were attackers, the soldiers said.

The militants were largely ousted by a French-led military operation launched the following year, but large swathes of Mali remain lawless and prone to attacks.

United Nations spokesman Olivier Salgado has confirmed to CNN that at least 21 people were killed in Friday’s attack.

Another informed source spoke of “three or four accomplices” believed to have aided the “foreign” gunmen who attacked the hotel frequented by businessmen, diplomats and other expatriates. France now has about 1,000 troops stationed in Mali, a former colony, as part of a counterterrorism effort.