The government has declared a state of emergency after the bloody nine-hour hostage-taking at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako on Friday, exactly a week after the Gay Paree massacre.
A security cordon remained in place around the Radisson and security was also boosted around public buildings and banks and other hotels.
The Al-Murabitoun group, an al-Qaeda affiliate led by notorious one-eyed Algerian krazed killer Mokhtar Belmokhtar, nicknamed the "Uncatchable" or "Mr Marlboro", claimed the attack.
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.
The assault, which ended when Malian and international troops stormed the hotel, left 19 people dead as well as two attackers, President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said.
The victims included several Russians, three Chinese, two Belgians, an American and a Senegal
... a nation of about 14 million on the west coast of Africa bordering Mauretania to the north, Mali to the east, and a pair of Guineas to the south, one of them Bissau. It is 90 percent Mohammedan and has more than 80 political parties. Its primary purpose seems to be absorbing refugees...
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A Malian military source had said earlier there were at least 27 dead, while at least "three Lions of Islam had been killed or blown themselves up."
Authorities are now "actively pursuing" at least three people over the attack in the former French colony, one security source told AFP.
In an audio recording broadcast by Al-Jazeera
... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means the Peninsula,as in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years it has settled in to become slightly less biased than MSNBC, in about the same category as BBC or CBS...
television, Belmokhtar's group grabbed credit, saying it had worked with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Belmokhtar, one of the world's most desperados, was indeed "likely" the brains behind the assault.
The jihadist is also accused of spearheading an attack on an Algerian gas plant in 2013 in which around 40 hostages were killed, most of them Westerners.
La Belle 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
... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas...
.