16:55

Al-Mourabitoun’s claim of responsibility on Twitter is, if genuine, the first the group has made using social media. But in all other respects there are good reasons to believe the al-Qaida-affiliated group has the capacity to carry out an attack such as the one on the Bamako hotel.

The group, based in the north of the country, is said to have carried out several attacks in the central and southern areas this year. It claimed responsibility for an attack on a hotel in Sévaré in central Mali in August, in which 13 people were killed, and an attack in Bamako on 7 March in which five people died when a gunman opened fire with a Kalashnikov inside the La Terrasse restaurant, on the roof of the VIP discotheque.

Al-Mourabitoun is led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar – the notorious jihadi believed responsible for the deadly attack on a gas plant in Algeria in 2013. The US has claimed that Belmokhtar was killed in an American air strike in June, although his fate remains unclear.

It was formed in 2013 out of a merger between Belmokhtar’s battalions and the Mali-based Movement for Monotheism and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao). The merger brought hundreds of largely Malian recruits into the militant group.