8th March, 2015
A peacekeeper and two children died Sunday as militants shelled a UN base in northern Mali, heightening security fears as police hunted jihadists who launched a deadly Bamako nightclub assault.
The UN’s MINUSMA force said more than 30 rockets were fired at its barracks in the rebel bastian of Kidal from 5:40am (0540 GMT).
“Once the source of the shooting was established, MINUSMA force soldiers immediately returned fire two kilometres (1.2 miles) from the camp, around 6:00 am,” the force said in a statement.
“An initial assessment revealed the death of a MINUSMA soldier and that eight soldiers were wounded. The rockets also hit Kidal citizens outside the camp and two deaths… were counted.”
The force said in an update on Twitter that the victims were children and that three civilians had also been injured.
A MINUSMA source told AFP they were members of the nomadic Arab Kunta tribe, which is spread across the Saharan regions of Mali, Algeria, Mauritania and Niger.
Their encampment near the UN base was hit by stray rockets as the attack got underway, the source said.
Sources inside the force also said the slain peacekeeper was Chadian, like the majority of personnel at the base.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible, although Kidal is the cradle of northern Mali’s Tuareg separatist movement, which has launched several uprisings from the region since the 1960s.
Tuareg and Arab militias — loyalist and anti-government — have forged a peace agreement with the Malian government formulated earlier this month in Algiers, although several rebel groups are yet to sign.
“MINUSMA strongly condemns these heinous acts of terror whose sole purpose is to thwart all ongoing efforts to establish lasting peace in Mali,” the force said.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other jihadist groups also carry out operations in Kidal, including the 2013 murders of French journalists Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon.
– ‘West insulted our prophet’ –
In Bamako, police in bulletproof vests patrolled the area where a masked gunman had burst into La Terrasse, a popular venue among expats, spraying automatic gunfire and throwing grenades early Saturday.
Al-Murabitoun, a jihadist group run by leading Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, has claimed responsibility for the attack, which left a Frenchman, a Belgian and three Malians dead.
It said in an audio recording carried by Mauritanian news agency Al-Akbar the operation was carried out “to avenge our prophet against the unbelieving West which has insulted and mocked him”.
Vehicle checks were stepped up on the three bridges over the Niger river as detectives focused on a black four-wheel drive apparently used by the nightclub attacker and an accomplice.
“We cannot say much more at this stage but there are clues about the vehicle used to transport the author of the crimes committed in Bamako,” a police source told AFP.
MINUSMA, which has around 10,000 personnel in Mali, said it has made investigators and crimes scene experts available to the authorities.
Police earlier announced they had arrested two Malians soon after but later said the pair were not involved, describing them as “not terrorists, but bandits”.
The French victim has been named as 30-year-old Fabien Guyomard, a single man with no children who had lived in Bamako since 2007 and worked at US construction company ICMS Africa.
Mali’s prime minister and president visited eight people who were being treated in hospital overnight, including two Swiss weapons experts advising the Malian government.
The pair were in a critical but stable condition after being hit by bullets, the Swiss military said in Geneva.
“We must remain vigilant, the population must report people behaving suspiciously,” Premier Modibo Keita told reporters.
– ‘Cowardly attack’ –
In the moments after the attack an AFP correspondent witnessed the French victim being taken by stretcher out of the venue while the bodies of the police officer, a guard and the Belgian could be seen outside.
“They reportedly shouted ‘death to whites’ on entering the restaurant… It sounds like an attack against the presence of Europeans,” a diplomatic source said.
French President Francois Hollande led the international outcry, condemning the “cowardly attack” and vowing to meet Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita to offer Paris’s help to its former colony.
Mali’s vast desert north is riven by ethnic rivalries and an Islamist insurgency.
Jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda controlled an area of desert the size of Texas for more than nine months until a French-led military intervention in 2013 that partly drove them from the region.
But day-to-day life in the capital, a city of 1.8 million, has been largely unaffected by the northern conflict.
“It’s the first attack of this type in Bamako,” said Pierre Boilley, an analyst specialising in sub-Saharan Africa.