Minibus attacked in Mali, 8 killed, 3 kids wounded

Gunmen have killed eight people in central Mali, a local official and security ministry staffer said, in the latest violence to hit the war-torn Sahel state.

Militants attacked a minibus Tuesday, the officials said, which was travelling between the towns of Bandiagara and Bankass in central Mali's volatile Mopti region, which is prone to frequent Takfiri attacks and ethnic killings.

"Armed men opened fire on the minibus," a local government official told AFP on Wednesday, adding that eight people died, four escaped and eight were seriously wounded, three of them children.

An official from Mali's security ministry, who also requested anonymity, confirmed the details of the attack and the death toll.

The local government official, and a survivor interviewed by AFP, both blamed the attack on Takfiri militants.

Mali has been struggling to contain a Takfiri insurgency that emerged in the north in 2012 and prompted a military intervention by France.

The extremists were routed in the French operation but regrouped. Today large stretches of the landlocked African state remain outside of government control.

Fighting, which has sometimes taken on an ethnic dimension, has since spread to the center of the country and neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have had to flee their homes.

Tuesday's attack occurred near the border with Burkina Faso, a region where militants also killed 12 Malian soldiers in a raid in mid-October.

SS