Malian special forces stormed a luxury
hotel in Bamako on Friday after Islamist gunmen took 170 people including many foreigners hostage in the capital
of the former French colony, which has been battling rebels allied to al Qaeda
for several years.
State television said 80 hostages had
been freed but the French newspaper Le Monde quoted
the Malian security ministry as saying at least three people had been killed in
the initial attack. An eye witness outside the hotel said gunfire could be
heard from time to time.
A senior security source said the
gunmen had burst into Radisson
Blu hotel at 7 a.m. (0200 ET),
firing and shouting "Allahu Akbar", or "God is great" in
Arabic, and begun working their way through the building, room by room and
floor by floor.
Some
hostages escaped under their own steam while others were freed after showing
they could recite verses from the Koran, one security source said.
Malian
President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita cut short a trip to a regional summit in Chad
to return to Bamako, his office said. French President Francois Hollande said
France would "use all the means available to us on the ground to free the
hostages".
The raid
on the hotel, which lies just west of the city center near government
ministries and diplomatic offices, comes a week after Islamic State militants
killed 129 people in Paris.
The
identity of the Bamako gunmen, or the group to which they belong, is not known.
Northern
Mali was occupied by Islamist fighters, some with links to al Qaeda, for most
of 2012. They were driven out by a French-led military operation, but sporadic
violence has continued in Mali's central belt on the southern reaches of the
Sahara, and in Bamako.
One
security source said as many as 10 gunmen had stormed the building, although
the company that runs the hotel, Rezidor Group, said it understood that there
were only two attackers.
The
hotel's head of security, Seydou Dembele, said two private security guards had
been shot in the legs in the early stages of the assault.
"We
saw two of the attackers. One was wearing a balaclava. The other was
black-skinned. They forced the first barrier," Dembele told Reuters.
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