Mali seeks info on hotel attack gunmen

Malian police have appealed for help to identify the two gunmen who carried out Friday’s attack on a hotel in the capital, Bamako, in which 22 people were killed.

Pictures of their bodies have been shown on state TV and police have asked for the public’s help to identify them. Malian and international troops stormed the Radisson Blu hotel to free guests and staff being held hostage.

Three different Islamist groups have said they carried out the attack. Investigators have yet to determine the number and nationality of the gunmen.

However, Islamist group al-Murabitoun, which first claimed responsibility for the attack, has issued a new audio recording identifying the two gunmen, reports say.

They were named as Abdel Hakim al-Ansari and Moadh al-Ansari.

One security source in Mali earlier told the BBC that officials believed that the two dead gunmen had been speaking English during the attack.

The police found a suitcase with grenades in the hotel lobby and were following up “several leads” linked to “objects” left by the gunmen, a Malian police source has told the AFP news agency.

Ahead of the three days of national mourning declared by Mali, the chairman of the West African regional bloc Ecowas, Senegal’s President Macky Sall, visited Bamako to show support.

He said on Sunday: “Mali will never be alone in this fight, we are all committed because we are all involved.”

Senegal, Mauritania and Guinea are also observing the mourning, which started on Monday.

The victims

• Six Malians, including one gendarme, three hotel workers and two others.
• Six Russians were killed, all employees of the Volga-Dnepr airline, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement. Volga-Dnepr reported that the six were Stanislav Dumansky and Pavel Kudryavtsev, mechanics; Vladimir Kudryashov, a flight radio operator; Konstantin Preobrazhensky, a flight engineer; Sergey Yurasov, a load manager, and Aleksandr Kononenko, a navigator.
• Three Chinese, Zhou Tianxiang and Wang Xuanshang and Chang Xuehui were executives from the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp, the company said in a statement on its website.
• Two Belgians, including Geoffrey Dieudonne, an official at the parliament in Belgium’s Wallonia region.
• US national Anita Ashok Datar, 41, was in Mali working on projects involving family planning and HIV. Ms Datar, the mother of a seven-year-old boy, was a senior manager at Palladium Group, an international development organisation.
• Israeli education consultant and executive Shmuel Benalal, who is reported to have been in Mali to work with the government.
• One Senegalese.
• One Lebanese, who worked at the hotel.
• One Burkina Faso national who worked at the hotel

This list has been provided to the BBC by a security source in Mali