Al-Qaeda denies killing civilians in Mali massacre

• Macina Katiba denies killing at least 132 civilians in Diallassagou and surrounding villages.
• Malian government has blamed the group for the massacre.
• Since 2012, Militants insurgencies have wracked the Sahel region.

An Al-Qaeda affiliate denied killing at least 132 civilians in three Mali villages over the weekend, The SITE Intelligence monitoring group said on Friday.

The Malian government has blamed Macina Katiba Militants for the massacre in Diallassagou and two surrounding villages and claims to have conducted air strikes against the group in the country’s center.

“The Militants (fighters) did not kill civilians and that is not their methodology,” the Militants grouping said in a statement Thursday, according to the SITE monitor of radical groups.

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It claimed it only entered one village of the three reported in the media.

Its fighters went to Diallassagou to look for villagers believed to have cooperated with Malian soldiers and to have contributed to the death of “many Muslims”, it said, and fired in the air when villagers came out to protest their arrival.

It denied having torched shops or taken the vehicles of “innocent people”, but said it seized the property of an unknown number of people it arrested.

It said those it detained were referred to a so-called “regional sharia committee” implementing its version of Islamic law.

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The massacre in and around Diallassagou was one of the worst civilian killings in Mali in recent years.

Since 2012, jihadist insurgencies have wracked the Sahel region.

The conflict began in the north and spread to the centre, as well as neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.