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Mali gunmen were hunting for Air France staff at Radisson
The terrorists behind Friday's assault on a hotel in Mali were actively hunting for an Air France crew who were staying there, security guards who witnessed the attack have claimed.Kasim Haidara, who was on duty when the gunmen stormed the Radisson hotel in Bamako, told The Telegraph that they confronted a colleague and demanded to know which floor the Air France crew were staying on. The fellow guard deliberately directed them to the wrong floor, Mr Haidara said, for which he was later shot dead by the terrorists. Mr Haidara's account would suggest that the group, who killed 19 people, was prioritising French citizens because of the country's two-year long military campaign against Islamists in northern Mali. It might also explain the Air France's decision to suspend its twice daily flights from Paris to Bamako shortly afterwards. Speaking of the "shocking, frightening" attack, Mr Haidara, 28, said that his colleague, Moussa Tiema-Konate, had been on the fifth floor of the hotel at the time. "When they got up there, the terrorists asked him: 'where are the staff of Air France?' He told them that they were on the seventh floor instead, and when they realised later that he had given them wrong information, they came back down and killed him." Air France has not commented on whether its staff were deliberately targeted or not, although did not confirm that 12 crew - including two pilots - were safely evacuated. Mr Haidara's claims emerged as a chef who worked in the hotel's kitchens said that one of the terrorists had calmly cooked himself a meal during the siege, which lasted nine hours. Ali Yazbeck, 30, who suffered a gunshot wound to the neck, told the New York Times that the gunman came into the kitchen, grilled some meat taken from a fridge, and then ate it before resuming combat. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by the Al-Murabitoun group, an Al-Qaeda affiliate led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed Algerian militant behind the 2013 Amenas gas refinery attack in Algeria that killed 40 hostages, including six Britons. Reports that the Mali attackers spoke in English with a Nigerian accent have raised speculation that the Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram could also have been involved. However, security officials say they would have expected the group to have made a claim of responsibility by now. Malian security forces say they are still hunting for "more than three" people who may have been involved in the attack, in which two of the gunmen were killed. Posted by: Steve White 2015-11-23 |
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