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| People run to flee from the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali, Friday, Nov. 20, 2015. The company that runs the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali's capital says assailants have takenhostages in a brazen assault involving grenades. |
AMAKO, Mali
(AP) -- The early breakfast crowd sipped coffee and picked at croissants
in the Radisson Blu's dining room, swiping through emails and the
morning headlines on their smartphones.
Outside
the luxury hotel, the dusty, red-earth streets were coming alive with
traffic, the whine of motorbikes mixed with the rumble of minibus taxis
amid the bustle of one of Africa's fastest-growing cities.
Five
hotel security guards were just finishing the overnight shift and about
to make the handoff to their
dayside colleagues. Another night, another
"Rien a signaler" (French for "Nothing to report"). As one of the
guards would later say, "We weren't concentrating."
That was the precise moment the attackers were waiting for on the morning of Nov. 20.
Two
men with Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives ran toward the
guards at 6:50 a.m., surprising them with a burst of automatic fire that
felled four of them, one fatally. The only guard to escape unhurt,
Cheick Dabo, took cover by diving under a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
It
was the beginning of the bloodiest jihadi attack ever in Mali's
capital, and the latest high-profile one in Africa, which has been hit
by extremist violence in countries like Somalia, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria
and Kenya.
Within the next few hours, the two
attackers and 20 victims would be dead. Coming just a week after the
Paris massacre, it was a shocking reminder that extremist violence
haunts not only the Middle East but also Europe, Africa, Asia, North
America and other lands.
The gunfire outside
the hotel struck instant terror among the nearly 150 guests and staff
members at the Radisson, considered one of Bamako's best-guarded hotels.
The guests included not only Malians but Chinese, Belgians, Indians,
Turks and Russians who were there for another day of meetings - some
about Mali's fragile peace process, others on multibillion-dollar
railway projects.
The attackers stormed the
main entrance with weapons blazing. Just past the glass doors, staff and
guests in the marble-floored lobby were overrun. With the attackers
firing wildly, the body count mounted quickly.
Tambacouye
"Tamba" Diarra, a maître d' in the restaurant, saw a gunman coming
toward him and ran. As he fled, he grabbed a guest returning from his
morning jog and dragged him to safety outside.
One
attacker rushed the rapidly emptying breakfast dining area, while his
partner stormed into the kitchen. A waitress there screamed, sparking a
panic.
"They are attacking us! They are attacking us!" she wailed, remembered hotel cook Mohammed Coulibaly.
The
cook began to shepherd as many people as he could out of the kitchen
and down a hallway. As they ran, they could hear gunshots behind them.
The
gunfire echoed upstairs, the sound bouncing off the circular staircase
and interior balconies facing the building's central atrium. Terrified
guests cowered in many of the seven-story hotel's 190 rooms.
Back
outside, the first news alerts were flashing across TVs worldwide: a
possible new slaughter, one week
after the Paris attacks that killed 130
people.
Terrified guests packed into an
elevator in a bid to flee, but their weight was too much, and the doors
wouldn't close. The gunmen fired mercilessly on those huddled inside.
"I
knelt down covering my face, then I crawled like a snake to a corner"
of the elevators, Leon Aharrh Gnama, a Togo native and guest, told the
Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. "One by one the others were
falling on top of me. They were soaking me with their blood. I heard
them struggle to breathe, in agony, say some words, shout. They were
dying and saving my life" at the same time.
At
7:45 a.m., Wu Zhiqi was hurrying downstairs for breakfast to join the
three Chinese executives he worked for as a translator on a railway
project, but when the doors to the elevator he was in opened, he spotted
a man carrying an assault rifle and bodies on the ground.
Alone
in the elevator, he managed to close the doors, then scrambled back to
his room and locked himself in the bathroom, where he tried via text
message to reach his bosses, probably already dead in the dining room.
He was rescued hours later.
Local police
arrived first, between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m. Lightly armed and not trained
for counterterrorism operations, they rushed into the hotel but were no
match for the killers. Police tossed several flash-bang grenades to try
to stun the attackers but were forced to retreat. More police arrived,
advancing slowly on the hotel behind the cover of a blue armored
vehicle.
A group of six U.S. military
personnel arrived shortly afterward, and by 8 a.m. they were seen
entering the hotel. Meanwhile, Malian special forces wearing full battle
gear and armed with Kalashnikovs sealed off the hotel and readied an
assault.
Guests dashed for the exits, one by
one or in small groups. Little by little, the number trapped inside
dwindled. A group of about 20 made a mass escape just before 9 a.m.
Others trapped higher in the building began a torturous hours-long wait
in their rooms as the attackers methodically hunted victims floor by
floor.
France, Mali's former colonial
overlord, dispatched about 40 of its special forces based in neighboring
Burkina Faso. They arrived at 2 p.m., descending in a helicopter close
to the hotel.
The international involvement in
the operation underscored how many countries have troops in Mali to
help contain the jihadi threat, including the Netherlands and Germany.
Despite those efforts, Mali remains a weak state with porous borders,
uncontrolled spaces and a variety of extremist groups that seem to be
competing to carry out spectacular attacks.
The
20 dead came from seven countries and included a 41-year-old American
development worker and three officials from a Chinese railway company,
suggesting the wide range of roles foreigners are playing in Mali as the
country attempts to recover from a 2012 coup and the temporary seizure
of northern Mali by jihadis over two years ago.
The
other victims were six Russian employees of a cargo company; six
Malians, including several hotel employees; two Belgians; one Israeli;
and one Senegalese, said Mali's interior ministry.
Around
3:30 p.m., Malian commandos launched an assault to capture or kill the
gunmen and rescue those inside. As the commandos advanced quickly to the
third floor, some with attack dogs straining at their leashes,
frightened guests relied on a password - the maître d's nickname -
confided to them by the front desk, Diarra said.
"We told guests who called the reception that if the person at the door said the word 'Tamba,' they can open it," he said.
The
attackers' last stand came at 4 p.m. on the third floor. French
commandos and Malian troops combined forces and managed to kill both
gunmen. Then the troops ascended to the upper floors in a painstaking,
room-to-room clearing operation.
Wearing a bulletproof vest supplied by police, Diarra helped police distinguish guests from possible attackers trying to escape.
Gnama,
the guest from Togo who survived under a pile of bodies in the
elevator, said he emerged from his gory hiding spot only after the
soldiers arrived. When he saw so many corpses in front of the check-in
area, he said, "I believe I fainted."
