NOUAKCHOTT (Mauritania), Sept 15: Suspected Al Qaeda militants killed 12 Mauritanian soldiers on Monday, two senior officials said. The attack, which came after the terror group promised to avenge the country’s recent coup, was the worst suffered by the military in three years.

Assailants ambushed an army unit patrolling the desert in Tourine, about 850 kilometres north of Nouakchott, a lieutenant-colonel told The Associated Press. The same account also was given by a senior official in the presidency. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

About two dozen soldiers in four vehicles were on a routine patrol when their convoy was raked with machine gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, the lieutenant-colonel said. Three of the vehicles were destroyed, and a fourth managed to return to base with 10 soldiers aboard. Among the dead was the captain who had led the patrol.

Defence officials have not commented on the record and there was no word on casualties among the attackers.

Al Qaeda in North Africa had called for a holy war to avenge the Aug 6 overthrow by the military of President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, Mauritania’s first freely elected president.

Monday’s attack marked the highest death toll incurred against the army in a single attack since 2005, when fighters linked to Algeria’s former Salafist Group for Call and Combat killed 15 soldiers in an assault on a desert outpost in Mgheiti, which is in the same area, near Mauritania’s borders with Mali and Algeria.

The Group for Call and Combat later recast itself as a branch of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network operating in northern Africa.

The United States had sent dozens of troops to train Mauritania’s military in the far northern deserts, hoping the country could act as a bulwark against the southward encroachment of Al Qaeda-linked militants in North Africa. But the US suspended those programmes along with more than US$20 million in aid after the August coup.

In late 2007, gunmen believed linked to Al Qaeda murdered four French tourists, prompting organisers of the famous Dakar Rally to cancel the race this year. Mauritanian authorities say suspected Muslim terrorists have fired shots at the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott and killed three soldiers near the town of Ghallawiya, around 700 kilometres north of the capital.

The coup leader, Gen Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, has accused Abdallahi of being soft on terrorism and freeing from jail radical Muslims who had been implicated in plotting attacks on Western embassies. He also has criticised Abdallahi for allotting cabinet posts to “Islamic extremists” from the Tawassoul party, which represents hard-line Muslims. The party says it is wrongly branded as hard-liners.—AP