adminBamako – Gunmen killed 10 civilians in an attack on the village of Gaberi in northern Mali, army spokesperson Souleymane Maiga said yesterday, a day after a siege by suspected Islamist gunmen northeast of the capital in which at least 12 died. The siege was the latest in what appears to be a campaign against Malian soldiers and United Nations personnel by remnants of an insurgency linked to al-Qaeda and newly formed Islamist militant groups.
Four UN personnel were freed in the pre-dawn raid that ended the 24-hour siege at a hotel in Sevare, but three to five UN workers were killed.
Maiga said it was too soon to know if the siege was connected to the village attack in which one gunman also died.
A 2013 French-led military operation drove back Islamist fighters, who had taken advantage of an ethnic Tuareg rebellion and a military coup to seize territory in the north a year earlier.
The UN has managed to broker a tenuous peace agreement between the government and Tuareg separatists, but Islamist fighters left out of the negotiations have mounted an insurgency.
Meanwhile, the first attack by Islamic extremists in a central Mali town, in which nine people were killed, shows that jihadist aggressions are spreading in the country and hitting more directly at the government military and the UN peacekeeping force, an expert said on Saturday.-AP.
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