Mali Islamists beat journalist after sharia plan thwarted

Islamists occupying northern Mali beat a radio presenter for reporting on their failed efforts to amputate a thief's hand as an embattled interim regime in the capital struggled to win back confidence. Amid attempts by Islamists to enforce sharia in the occupied vast desert north, the government vowed Monday to work flat out to regain lost territory and underscored its commitment to secularism. However protesters demanding the resignation of interim President Dioncounda Traore took to the streets of the capital Bamako and police fired tear gas to disperse them. In the extremist-occupied north, radio presenter Abdoul Malick Maiga was in the Gao hospital on Monday after a thrashing by the town's Islamist rulers. "He regained consciousness but is still in intense pain," a doctor at the hospital told AFP on condition of anonymity. "He has scratches on his eye. He explained that the Islamists came to arrest him as he was commenting on the population's refusal to accept the amputation of a thief's hand," he added. Another doctor said the presenter had been beaten "with a stick by the Islamists who accused him of criticising them." Hundreds of people protested on Sunday night in Gao demanding Maiga's release from detention and set fire to a car belonging to a leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) which controls Gao. The Islamists fired shots into the air to disperse the crowd. On Saturday MUJAO announced on private radio they would amputate the thief's hand at a town square, but hundreds of protesters on Sunday stormed the square to prevent them from carrying out the sentence. According to local sources, the accused was a young MUJAO recruit who had stolen weapons to re-sell them. "We don't want to know what this young man did, but they are not going to cut his hand off in front of us," a resident said on Sunday. This is the first report of the extremists trying to stage an amputation since they occupied the north of the country four months ago. The residents of Gao have struck out against the occupation, and MUJAO had eased up on applying Islamic law after violent anti-Islamist protests in May left one dead. In the small town of Aguelhok, another armed Islamist group Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith) publicly stoned an unmarried couple to death late last month. The Islamist groups, which security experts say are acting under the aegis of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), seized key northern cities in the chaos following a coup d'etat in Bamako on March 22. The embattled west African nation is currently under the stewardship of a transition government which took over from the military junta. In a statement on Monday government vigorously condemned both the attack on the protester and the attempted amputation, reaffirming its "commitment to freedom of the press as well as the irreversible secularity of the Malian state." It said authorities were working "flat out for the total recuperation of the occupied zones and the restoration of the authority of the state." Thus far the interim government has stood by helplessly as the extremists deepen their hold on the north. Mediators from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ordered the interim government to form a more inclusive unity government which would be better equipped to deal with the various crises. An initial deadline of July 31 was postponed after the return of President Dioncounda Traore from Paris, where he spent two months recovering from a brutal attack by opponents to his appointment. Upon his return, Traore announced the formation of new transition bodies to tackle the various problems and announced he would take over negotiations to form a unity government as demanded by west African mediators. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has 3,300 standby troops ready to be sent to Mali, but is awaiting a formal request from Bamako and a mandate from the UN Security Council. France has said an African military intervention was "desirable and inevitable" but Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the former colonial power would not take the lead.