Tunisia's 25-year-old who detonated a grenade, Wednesday, January 5, outside the Embassy of France in Bamako told police he wanted to prove to "old friends" of Al Qaeda that was "able to strike a blow himself," said a police source. During his interrogation in the anti-criminal brigade in Bamako, the young man, "as an individual, a hatred of France," said he had been first contacted in 2005 when armed Islamists was " in Koranic schools in Mauritania." He then spent "four months in the camps of Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb" (AQIM) in the Sahara, where he had received "an ideological and military training." Then he was "angry with the people of AQIM" and went to Senegal sell mobile phones. Finally, he wanted to show his "old comrade AQIM" he was "able to strike a blow himself." "That's why I came to Mali and I chose the Embassy of France," he told police.
These remarks tend to prove that his action, poorly prepared, was an isolated act done out of bravado, rather than a planned attack by AQIM. The Malian Ministry of Security said Wednesday evening in a statement that "an individual of foreign nationality" had "exploded a gas bottle outside the Embassy of France in Bamako." But witnesses had contradicted this account, asserting that it was not a cylinder but "a grenade".
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