WORRYING SIGNS: Children walk in front of ripped presidential campaign posters in Bamako.  Mali will be holding a presidential election on July 28.

AFP/Reuters/DPA/Bamako

Gunmen abducted four polling staff and a local official yesterday in the northern Malian town of Tessalit, a week before a presidential poll meant to restore the country’s unity, a local official said.

“Four electoral staff and an elected Tessalit official, all of them Malian ... were snatched by gunmen,” an official in the Kidal governor’s office told AFP.

He said the five hostages had been at the town hall in Tessalit, a remote town some 200km north of the flashpoint northern city of Kidal, to plan the distribution of ID cards to registered voters when they were kidnapped.

“The governor is currently in an emergency meeting in Kidal to see what needs to be done. We have not yet had any news on the abductees,” he said.

“They set out from Kidal to distribute the cards. They are four election officials as well as the deputy mayor of Kidal,” the spokesperson of the ministry of territorial affairs, Gamer Dicko, told DPA.

An African military source in Kidal, where four people were killed in pre-election violence on Thursday, confirmed receiving information about a kidnapping involving polling staff and an elected official, but did not specify the number of victims.

A Malian security ministry official said the kidnapping appeared to be the work of the minority Tuareg rebel group the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA).

“Everything indicates this is an attack by the MNLA, which doesn’t want there to be an election,” the official said.

“It is the MNLA who are responsible. They are the only armed group here aside from the French and the Chadian army,” he said by telephone. “They are trying to sabotage the elections.”

The MNLA took control of Kidal in February after a French-led military intervention ousted Al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters who had seized control of most of northern Mali.

The Malian authorities finally reclaimed the city after signing a deal with the MNLA and another Tuareg group on June 18 aimed at reuniting the country and clearing the way for elections to restore democratic rule.

Under the deal, MNLA forces moved into barracks as 150 regular Malian troops were deployed to secure Kidal ahead of the July 28 vote.

The kidnappings come after violence between Tuaregs and Mali’s majority black population rocked Kidal on Thursday and Friday.

Officials said armed men went on a rampage on Thursday, looting and ransacking shops and businesses, killing four people and wounding many others.

On Friday, arsonists set fire to the city’s central market.

“Armed men attacked the population favourable to Mali in the town of Kidal, killing four people,” the government said in a statement.

The clashes were a violation of June’s truce signed in Ouagadougou, the capital of neighbouring Burkina Faso, it said.

The MNLA said yesterday that its fighters were not involved in the violence and that they had honoured the Ouagadougou agreement.