BAMAKO: Mali’s government on Sunday announced the sacking of senior military officers and the dissolution of a militia, a day after the massacre of more than 130 Muslims, including women and children.

Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga said new military chiefs would be named, and that the Dan Nan Ambassagou association, composed of Dogon hunters, had been dissolved.

The dissolution of the militia was to send a clear message, Maiga told journalists: “The protection of the population will remain the monopoly of the state.”

Survivors of Saturday’s attack said ethnic Dogon hunters carried out the deadly raid in Ogossagou, a village in central Mali inhabited by the Muslim Fulani community.

Maiga did not name the senior officers sacked, but defence ministry sources said they were the Armed Forces Chief of General Staff M’Bemba Moussa Keita, and chiefs of the army and the air force.

The prime minister’s announcement came hours after an emergency meeting called by President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in response to Saturday’s massacre, in which at least 134 men, women and children were killed.

The victims were shot or hacked to death with machetes, a security source said.

It was the deadliest attack since the end of the 2013 French-led military intervention that drove back jihadist groups who had taken control of northern Mali.

UN chief ‘outraged’

The massacre took place as a delegation from the United Nations Security Council visited the Sahel region to assess the jihadist threat there.

“The Secretary-General is shocked and outraged by reports that at least 134 civilians, including women and children, have been killed,” Antonio Guterres’s spokesman said in a statement, late Saturday.

The UN chief called on the Malian authorities “to swiftly investigate it and bring the perpetrators to justice”, the statement added.

Guterres’s spokesman said the UN mission in Mali, MINUSMA, provided air support to deter further attacks and assisted with the evacuation of the injured.

Earlier, the UN said the visiting ambassadors from the Security Council countries met on Saturday with Maiga and discussed with him the volatile situation in the centre of the country.

The attack was launched at dawn on Saturday in the village near the border with Burkina Faso, in a district that has been the scene of frequent inter-communal violence.

While local attacks are fuelled by accusations of grazing cattle on Dogon territory and disputes over access to land and water, the area is also troubled by jihadist influence.

In the past four years, jihadist fighters have emerged as a threat in central Mali. A group led by radical Islamist preacher Amadou Koufa has recruited mainly from the Muslim Fulani community.

Since then, there have been repeated clashes between the nomadic Fulani herders and the Dogon ethnic group.

Last year that violence cost the lives of 500 civilians, according to UN figures.

Once considered a beacon of democracy and stability in Africa, Mali in recent years has been dogged by a coup, civil war and Islamist terrorism.

Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2019