Banditry on the increase in the north

Heavily armed bandits wounded six people and made off with vehicles and other booty in three attacks in as many days in northern Mali, according to local media and humanitarian sources. On Saturday, two heavily armed masked men held up three employees of a Chinese company that is digging wells in the desert, the official ‘Essor’ daily reported on Tuesday. The workers were boarding their Toyota pickup with purchases they had just made in the market in the north-eastern town of Kidal when the men forced them out of the vehicle and drove off with it, the daily reported. Two days later, eight armed bandits aboard a Land Cruiser intercepted a convoy of vehicles belonging to the German cooperation agency, the Malian public works department and two private firms between the north-western towns of Timbuktu. Five people were injured when the attackers fired on cars that tried to escape, according to ‘Essor’. Bandits attacked a US Agency for International development (USAID) convoy in the same area on Monday, wounding a driver and a stealing one of the two vehicles, a USAID source told IRIN on Tuesday. A humanitarian source told IRIN the bandits later took a radio set from the German cooperation agency GTZ in Tinaisha, located on the road that leads from Timbuktu to Mauritania.