Two Islamic extremist terrorists were sentenced to death Wednesday in Mali for carrying out one terror attack and planning two others, including the 2015 hostage crisis in which two gunmen killed 20 people at a hotel.
Fawaz Ould Ahmed and Sadou Chaka pleaded guilty and expressed no remorse for the three attacks, French news agency AFP reported.
Ould Ahmed, a Mauritian national, said he was personally responsible for a March 2015 attack where he shot five people at a restaurant in the Malian capital of Bamako, according to Reuters.
Ould Ahmed and Chaka are best known, however, for planning the November 2015 attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in the capital. Two terrorists took 170 people hostage at the posh hotel, eventually executing 20 of them before special forces stormed the building and killed the jihadists.
The Radisson attack was carried out by al-Mourabitoun, an African terror group with ties to al-Qaeda that Ould Ahmed and Chaka said they were part of. They also pleaded guilty to masterminding a different Mali hotel raid in August 2015 that killed 17 people.
Mali authorities captured Ould Ahmed in April 2016 while he was planning a new attack in Bamako. They found him armed with grenades and a suitcase full of weapons.
The Malian military has been battling Islamic extremists in the country’s northern regions since 2012.
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