Russians killed in Mali hotel attack

It also called for three days of mourning for the victims of the attack, which was claimed by the Al-Murabitoun group of notorious Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar in an audio recording broadcast by Al-Jazeera television.

Gunmen went on the rampage through the hotel from the early morning, shooting in the corridors and taking 170 guests and staff hostage, many of them foreigners.

Mali’s interior minister says that of the 19 people killed in Friday’s attack on a luxury hotel in the capital, 18 were guests, while the other was a member of the military police guarding the hotel. The CMA is a coalition of groups seeking autonomy in northern Mali including ethnic Arabs and Tuaregs.

Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar declared a 10-day state of emergency in the country on Saturday. “The hotel that was attacked is being combed through carefully”, authorities said.

Investigators in Mali yesterday were hunting at least three people suspected of links to the assault. The deaths of the six Russians follow the downing last month of a Russian airliner over Egypt in a bomb attack claimed by the Islamic State.

World leaders have condemned the attack, with United States President Barack Obama calling it “appalling”, and saying “this barbarity only stiffens our resolve to meet this challenge” of extremist violence.

Jean-Herve Jezequel, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said Al-Mourabitoun may be allying with al-Qaida in the face of the losses the extremists have suffered at the hands of French forces that intervened in Mali in 2013 after much of the north fell to radical Islamists.

The lone American killed in Friday’s terrorist attack in Mali was a native of western MA.

The exact number of attackers remains unknown, with the figures ranging between two and thirteen.

Anita Ashok Datar, a former Peace Corps volunteer and an executive with an worldwide development consulting firm in Washington, D.C., was the lone American fatality.

Monique Kouame Affoue Ekonde of Ivory Coast said she and six other people, including a Turkish woman, were escorted out by security forces as the gunmen rushed toward the fifth or sixth floor.

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 didn’t see the jihadists until they started firing on us”.

France has more than 1,000 troops in its former colony, a key battleground of the Barkhane counter-terror mission spanning five countries in Africa’s restive Sahel region.