Shooters killed 16 people at an Ivory Coast resort on Sunday, leaving bodies strewn on the beach, in an attack claimed by an al-Qaeda affiliate as fears grow of a mounting militant threat in West Africa.
Armed with grenades and assault riffles, the attackers stormed three hotels in the sleepy resort of Grand-Bassam, popular with expatriates, about 40km east of the commercial hub of Abidjan.
Witnesses described panic as the shooters sprayed bullets across the beach and one told reporters they heard an assailant shouting “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is great.”
“I saw one of the attackers from far away,” said Lebanese salesman Abbas al-Roz, who was in the pool of a hotel when the attackers struck. “He had a Kalashnikov and a grenade belt. He was looking for people.”
Fourteen civilians and two special forces troops were killed in the shooting spree, along with six assailants, Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara said.
“The toll is heavy,” he said as he arrived in Grand-Bassam, describing the killings as a “terrorist” attack.
One French and one German were among the dead, Minister of the Interior Hamed Bakayoko said.
The US, and former colonial master France offered to help the Ivorian government find the perpetrators, with French President Francois Hollande condemning the “cowardly attack.”
The US-based SITE Intelligence Group said al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — the terror group’s North African affiliate — had claimed responsibility for the attack.
AQIM said in a statement that three of its fighters had been killed.
The assailants, who were “heavily armed and wearing balaclavas, fired at guests at the L’Etoile du Sud, a large hotel which was full of expats in the current heatwave,” a witness told reporters.
Inside the hotel, a journalist saw a bullet lodged in the glass front of the bar’s refrigerator and a large pool of blood on the floor.
Carine Boa, a Belgian-Ivorian national who teaches at an international high school in Abidjan, was at one of the beach bars with her two sons when the gunmen arrived
“We were really scared. We thought of the people at the Bataclan,” she said, referring to the concert venue attacked by gunmen during November last year’s terror attacks in the French capital in which 130 people were killed.
“I thought this was it for us. You always tell yourselves that these things can’t happen,” she added.
The army was tightly controlling access to the area after the attack and a journalist saw about a dozen people, including an injured Western woman, being evacuated in a military truck.
Fears have been growing of terrorist attacks and the recently concluded Flintlock military exercise, grouping African, US and European troops, focused on the need to counter Muslim militant groups in the region.
Sunday’s attack comes as a blow to Ivory Coast’s tourism sector, which the government is seeking to boost as the country emerges from a decade of political crisis.
Ouattara was re-elected for a second presidential term late last year, hoping to turn the page on the violence and revive Ivory Coast’s conflict-scarred economy.
Former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo is currently on trial at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity over deadly violence that followed the disputed 2010 election that brought Ouattara to power.
More than 3,000 people were killed in five months of unrest after the presidential polls, when Gbagbo refused to concede defeat.
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