At least nine people were killed and more than 60 were hurt early Saturday when three suicide bombers attacked the town of Sevare in central Mali with three bombs. The attack destroyed about 20 houses and killed at least nine people.
Yacouba Maiga, the spokesman, told Reuters by phone that all of the people killed and hurt in the blasts were bystanders. No one said right away that they were behind the attack.
After a Tuareg separatist revolt in 2012, Mali’s dry north became the centre of a violent conflict, and Sevare is home to a major Mali military base and troops from the UN mission in Mali.
Since the uprising, militants with ties to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have moved to countries in the Sahel region south of the Sahara and, more recently, to coastal states, where they have taken over land, killed thousands of people, and forced millions to leave their homes.
Images posted on social media showed that the blast had damaged several buildings, including a petrol station, and that people who had been hurt were being helped. The pictures could not be checked by Reuters on their own.
Two days earlier, in a shooting, the chief of staff of Mali’s temporary president and three other people were killed.
Earlier on Saturday, the government of the West African country said in a statement that was read on national TV that the army had stopped “a terrorist attack” in Sevare.
“Three vehicles filled with explosives were destroyed by army drone fire,” the statement said, without giving more information about deaths.
Separately on Saturday, the Malian army said in a statement that a military chopper coming back from a mission had crashed in a residential area of the city, Bamako, and that it was checking out the crash site.
Reuters
