Rotting bodies a grim drawcard in Malian city

GAO: A severed head, a mangled leg and shredded flesh rotting in the sun: not your typical souvenir photograph, but hundreds of Malians streamed to the Gao City Hall on Saturday, the scene of an epic battle this week, to see the remains of their former tormentors.

Cellphones in hand, they wanted to record the defeat of the militants who attacked the city before rigging themselves with explosives and holing themselves up in the city hall. They died in a hail of Malian army gunfire.

“We want to see them dead,” said one resident.

The stench of rotting human flesh filled the sunsoaked street but residents pulled their t-shirts over their noses and kept coming, hoping to snap a picture of the bodies.

A Malian soldier seemed surprised at the suggestion that the area should be cordoned off.

“When the al-Qaeda people were here, it was much worse, there were more dead than this. People have become used to it,” he said.

For nine months, when Mali was effectively split in two, militiamen from the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao), an offshoot of the main alQaeda franchise in the region, ruled the city.

They imposed an extreme form of Islamic law, flogging, amputating and sometimes executing violators.

At the foot of the city hall steps, the severed head of a bomber lies like a forgotten football. His leg is 15m away, next to the bodies of two other fighters, presumably killed by their comrades’ suicide blast.

Mujao fighters had fled the city under the French-led advance late last month. But they infiltrated the city a few days ago to attack the Malian forces newly in control.

The worst fighting was on Thursday, when Malian soldiers fired heavy artillery and rocket-propelled grenades at the Mujao fighters before calling the French army for help.

The last Islamist fighter in the city hall was killed on Friday morning.

The French military said 15 to 20 Islamists died, four Malian soldiers and two French were wounded.