The deadly attack on a hotel in Mali's capital claimed by two radical Islamist groups has put veteran militant leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar back in the spotlight months after he was reported killed.
In June authorities in Libya said Belmokhtar, who is Algerian, had been killed by a US air strike there.
However, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) denied four days later that he was dead.
In a statement posted on Twitter on June 19, the group said he was "still alive and well and he wanders and roams in the land of Allah, supporting his allies and vexing his enemies".
His group, Al Mourabitoun, now claims to have stormed the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako in a joint operation with AQIM in which 27 people have been reported killed.
"He (Belmokhtar) is probably behind this attack," French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told TF1 television.
"Al Mourabitoun is a mixture of fundamentalists and bandits, who traffic weapons and drugs to finance themselves," he said. The US government also believes the two groups staged the attack, a government source said.
One security source said the Bamako attack could serve to refocus global attention on al Qaeda after Islamic State, which controls a swath of Iraq and Syria, launched co-ordinated assaults a week ago in Paris in which at least 129 people died.
AL QAEDA OFFSHOOT
Al Mourabitoun "is an offshoot of al Qaeda, whose roots go back to the Algerian insurgency of the 1990s ... Their strategy has been to launch these fairly dramatic attacks," said Gregory Mann, professor of West African history at Columbia University in New York.
The group's leadership is mostly from Algeria and Mauritania, but it has flourished in Mali and drawn militants from other West African countries including Togo, Burkina Faso and Ghana, he said.
