Mali: Key Islamist militant financier captured

Mali’s army has arrested Alaye Bocari, a leading financial backer of an Islamist militant group responsible for an expansion of deadly attacks in the West African nation, military and defense sources said on Monday.

The attacks carried out by the Massina Liberation Front (MLF), led by radical preacher and jihadist Amadou Koufa, have helped shift Mali’s Islamist conflict from the remote desert north ever closer to its populous south.

Bocari is among Koufa’s close collaborators according to intelligence gathered by the military, said army spokesman Colonel Souleymane Maiga. “He was arrested on November 13 in the region of Mopti by an army patrol acting on information given by the population,” he said.

The arrest, one of around 30 carried out so far during an army operation launched late last month, was confirmed by a defense ministry spokesman who declined to give further details.

Regional and international forces launched a military intervention in 2013 to drive back Islamist militants who seized the north a year earlier creating what could become a base for attacks on other countries. The operation drove the fighters from major population centers.

Source: Reuters