Bamako: French armed forces have killed a top jihadist leader in an air and ground ambush in Mali, the government said Friday, ending a years-long hunt for a man accused of masterminding the kidnapping of Westerners in the Sahel region.
Djamel Okacha, an Algerian commander in Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was killed Thursday after French commandos, helicopters and a drone hit a column of vehicles he was travelling in north of Timbuktu, according to French officials.
Okacha, a jihadist veteran known also as Yahya Abou El Hamame, was ‘the mastermind and financier of several attacks’, the French defence ministry said in a release. US officials had accused him of kidnapping a number of Westerners in North and West Africa.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe arrived late Friday here at the Mali capital, along with Defence Minister Florence Parly, on a visit to show ‘support’ for Mali, where some 4,500 French troops have been deployed since 2014 to retake the north of the country after it fell to jihadist fighters.
Earlier Parly had described the killing of the jihadist commander as a ‘spectacular action’, stating it followed a manhunt which lasted several years. “His (Okacha) death deals a very hard blow to terrorist groups in the Sahel,” she asserted.
“When commandos approached, (jihadist) pickups opened fire, prompting the helicopters to return fire,” a spokesman for the French military command informed. A total of 11 terrorists, including El Hamame, were killed,” he added.
El Hamame is suspected of involvement in the 2009 assassination of a US citizen, Christopher Leggett, in Mauritania, along with an attack the same year against the French embassy in Nouakchott.
El Hamame, aged about 40, took charge of Al-Qaeda’s operations in southern Algeria and northern Mali in 2013 when he replaced Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, who was himself killed in fighting French-led forces in northern Mali.
AFP