BAMAKO, Mali (AP) – The early breakfast crowd sipped coffee and picked at croissants in the Radisson Blu’s dining room, swiping through emails and the morning headlines on their smartphones.
Outside the luxury hotel, the dusty, red-earth streets were coming alive with traffic, the whine of motorbikes mixed with the rumble of minibus taxis amid the bustle of one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities.
Five hotel security guards were just finishing the overnight shift and about to make the handoff to their dayside colleagues. Another night, another “Rien a signaler” (French for “Nothing to report”). As one of the guards would later say, “We weren’t concentrating.”
That was the precise moment the attackers were waiting for on the morning of Nov. 20.
Two men with Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives ran toward the guards at 6:50 a.m., surprising them with a burst of automatic fire that felled four of them, one fatally. The only guard to escape unhurt, Cheick Dabo, took cover by diving under a four-wheel-drive vehicle.