French soldiers arrested a top terrorist official Sunday in Mali in a border area as the French army finished its withdrawal from the African country, the French General Staff announced Wednesday.
The General Staff reported that on the night of June 11 to 12, 2022, an operation carried out by the French anti-terror force “Barkhane (…) led to the arrest of Omayya Ould al-Beqai, a senior official in the terrorist organization ISIS in the Greater Sahara.”
A security source told AFP that the terrorist “who should have succeeded to the emir,” the former leader of ISIS in the Greater Sahara, Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, who was killed by French forces in August 2021, “had skills in dealing with explosives.”
Al-Beqai was the leader of the organization in the Sahara in Gourma in Mali and Oudalan in northern Burkina Faso, according to the French General Staff. The same source pointed out that Al-Buqa’i “organised several attacks on several different military bases in Mali, including the Gao base.
He led networks to install explosive devices.
And a local representative confirmed the arrest of Al-Beqai “during the intervention of a helicopter in a camp” in the Tissit sector, on the financial side of the so-called Triangle border area on the borders of Burkina Faso and Niger.
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