Burkina Faso hotel siege ends as troops storm site; 20 dead

Security forces have ended a siege in the Burkina Faso capital Ouagadougou, the government said Saturday morning, hours after al-Qaeda seized a luxury hotel, killing at least 20 people.

The Burkinabe government said 126 people had been freed and three jihadis were dead after local troops and French special forces stormed the four-star Splendid Hotel — popular with UN staff and foreigners.

Internal Affairs Minister Simon Compaore said a siege at a second hotel was still ongoing.

The death toll at the Splendid Hotel could rise, after Compaore said Saturday morning that 10 bodies had been found inside the adjacent Cappuccino Cafe.

The harrowing attack was launched by the same extremists behind a similar siege at an upscale hotel in the Malian capital back in November that left 20 dead.

Dozens of French forces arrived overnight from neighboring Mali to aid the rescue. One US military member was embedded with French forces on the scene of the attack, and the United States was working to help provide France with surveillance and reconnaissance help, according to a US senior defense official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

French President François Hollande condemned the “odious and cowardly attack.”

“French forces are providing support to Burkinabe forces,” the president’s office said in a statement Saturday, adding that “the president expressed his full support to President Kabore.”

The local al-Qaeda affiliate known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed responsibility online as the attack was ongoing in downtown Ouagadougou at the 147-room hotel, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.

In a message posted in Arabic on the militants’ “Muslim Africa” Telegram account, it said fighters had “broke into a restaurant of one of the biggest hotels in the capital of Burkina Faso, and are now entrenched and the clashes are continuing with the enemies of the religion.” Fighters who spoke by phone later “asserted the fall of many dead Crusaders,” AQIM said, according to SITE.

The group called the attack “revenge against France and the disbelieving West,” SITE said.

Burkina Faso, a largely Muslim country in West Africa, had for years been mostly spared from the violence carried out by Islamic extremist groups who were abducting foreigners for ransom in Mali and Niger. Then last April, a Romanian national was kidnapped in an attack that was the first of its kind in Burkina Faso.

The country also has been in growing political turmoil since its longtime president was ousted in a popular uprising in late 2014. Last September members of a presidential guard launched a coup that lasted only about a week. The transitional government returned to power until Burkina Faso’s November election ushered in new leaders.

Friday’s violence mirrored a devastating attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in neighboring Mali back in November that left 20 people dead.

In that case, Malian troops — backed by French and American special forces — swarmed in to retake the building and free terrified guests and hotel staff during a siege that lasted more than seven hours.

The Bamako hotel attack also was claimed by a leader of AQIM, who said it had been carried out as a declaration of unity with Algerian militant Moktar Belmoktar’s extremist group Al-Mourabitoun, according to an audio speech that was distributed by SITE at the time. Belmoktar was a former leader in AQIM before starting his own group, which now has merged back with al-Qaeda.