Militant group claims Mali hotel assault after leader ‘returns from dead’

If Islamist militant group Al-Mourabitoun is confirmed as responsible for Friday's killings at a hotel in Mali, it will be the latest time it has staged a major attack despite setbacks and the supposed death of its leader.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar has been a key figure for years in insurgencies across north Africa and the Saharan border region, but in June, authorities in Libya said the Algerian had been killed by a US air strike.

US military officials said he had been specifically targeted, only for al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim) to deny four days later that he was dead. In a statement posted on Twitter on June 19th, his group said Belmokhtar was "still alive and well and he wanders and roams in the land of Allah, supporting his allies and vexing his enemies".

The group now claims to have stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako on Friday in a joint operation with Aqim. Al-Mourabitoun has staged several attacks in Mali and the region, but Belmokhtar has had a troubled relationship with al-Qaeda. His group has not pledged allegiance to Islamic State, as Nigerian militants Boko Haram did in March.

One security source said the Bamako attack could serve to sway global attention to al-Qaeda from Islamic State, which controls a swathe of Iraq and Syria and launched assaults a week ago in Paris.Al-Mourabitoun "is an offshoot of al-Qaeda, whose roots go back to the Algerian insurgency of the 1990s . . . Its strategy has been to launch these fairly dramatic attacks," said Gregory Mann, professor of west African history at Columbia University in New York.– (Reuters)