Gunmen Attack Hotel in Mali's Bamako, Take Hostages

Police sources said on Sunday that "two foreigners", along with "three or four accomplices", are suspected of carrying out a jihadist siege at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali's capital on Friday, which left almost 20 people dead.

China's official news agency Xinhua, citing a statement on the website of the China Railway Construction Corp., said three executives - Zhou Tianxiang, Wang Xuanshang and Chang Xuehui - were killed. "These terrorists are a global threat that we need to attack globally", said lawmaker Amadou Thiam, a vice president of Mali's parliament.

The area around the Radisson hotel is being sealed off by security forces as they try to assess the situation, an anonymous official told Reuters.

He says France stepped in two years ago at Mali's request to drive al-Qaeda terrorists who took control of two thirds of that vast country and were threatening the capital Bamako.

It is not thought that the attack in Mali has anything to do with the attacks in Paris.

It was involved in several other attacks on Malian hotels, including an incident in August when militants killed 13 people in the central Malian town of Sevare. One of those killed was an American citizen, the US State Department said without providing additional details.

Army commander Modibo Nama Traore said 10 gunmen stormed the hotel shouting "Allahu Akbar" - "God is great" in Arabic - before firing on the guards and taking hostages.

In an audio recording broadcast by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television, Belmokhtar's group claimed responsibility.

Jean-Herve Jezequel, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said Al-Mourabitoun might be allying with al-Qaida in the face of the losses the extremists have suffered at the hands of French forces that intervened in Mali in 2013 after much of the north fell to radical Islamists.

The attack appears to have had an immediate effect on the country's tourism industry with one major hotel it had received numerous cancellations, and that restaurant and business center reservations were down.

Northern Mali was occupied by Islamist fighters, some with links to Al-Qaeda, for most of 2012.

The militants were largely ousted by a French-led military operation launched the following year, but large swaths of Mali remain lawless.

More than 130 hotel guests and staff were freed when Malian Special Forces, French Special Forces and off-duty U.S. servicemen stormed the hotel on Friday to break the siege.

The group said yesterday there was only two attackers and suggested they were Malian.