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Africa North
Mali bar attack kills five in Bamako
2015-03-08
Bamako, Mali -- Five people have been killed in a machine-gun and grenade attack on a bar in Mali's capital, Bamako.
Another one for Besoeker's list...
A masked gunman opened fire at La Terrasse bar, killing a French national, witnesses said. A Belgian security official working for the EU and three Malians also died in the attack.

One witness said an attacker shouted "God is Great" in Arabic ("Allahu Akbar").
That convinces me but it won't convince Marie Harf...
It is the first attack of its kind in the capital. Police sources said two people connected to the incident had been detained.

It is not clear who carried out the attack,
Lutherans? Quakers? Ruritanians? Esquimaux? Use your imagination, BBC, progressives are good at that...
but al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militants have been fighting the army in northern Mali for a number of years. France, the former colonial power in Mali, intervened two years ago to stop their advance south on Bamako.

French President Francois Hollande condemned the attack as "cowardly". He spoke by phone to Malian counterpart Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and they "decided on common measures to strengthen security in Mali", the French presidency said.
Unless the "common measures" include tracking down and killing the al-Qaeda hard boyz it isn't going to work. Though Marie Harf would offer them jobs...
If confirmed as the work of Islamist fundamentalists, this would be the first such attack in Bamako. But locals have long feared it might happen.

Many think the UN and the French and Malian militaries have been complacent to believe the danger is limited to Mali's north. There is very little security in Bamako apart from around foreign embassies and the UN mission.

The attack happened shortly after midnight. Witnesses and officials said the attackers had killed the Belgian and Malian victims near the bar. Our reporter says French soldiers arrived quickly afterwards on the first-floor nightclub on Saturday.

They confirmed that a man killed at the bar, in the Hippodrome area of the capital popular with expatriates, was a French national. The French foreign ministry later named him as 30-year-old Fabien Guyomard, who French media said was in Mali working for a private company. One of the Malian victims is believed to have been a police officer, and another a security guard, our correspondent says.

A witness told the BBC he had seen four men flee the scene in a vehicle and one on a motorbike.

Nine people were wounded in the attack, officials said. They reportedly include three Swiss citizens, two of whom were soldiers working at the UN mission, according to the Swiss defence ministry.
Posted by:Steve White

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