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| - Around a hundred civil servants gathered in Mali's capital Bamako on Thursday demanding the release of local officials held hostage by jihadists, a week after a French aid worker and two Italian captives were freed. The demonstrators held posters condemning the "selective release" of foreign hostages as they filed a motion with the prime minister's office demanding the release of eight local leaders kidnapped since 2018. Around 10 other municipal administrative officials "have been held for more than a year", according to the text. An elderly French aid worker, Sophie Petronin, was released last week after being held captive by jihadists in northern Mali for four years. The interim government in Bamako released some 200 prisoners to secure her release, as well as the freeing of two Italian hostages and Malian opposition politician Soumaila Cisse. Mali has been struggling to contain a jihadist insurgency that first emerged in the north of the country in 2012, which has since spread to the centre of the country and neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger. In the latest violence, 23 people were killed in central Mali in a series of attacks on Tuesday, in the deadliest ambush since military officers seized power in August. "The objective of this march is to support our comrades taken hostage by terrorists," Abdoulaye Djire, a civil administrator, told AFP. "We cannot understand how we can release four hostages, including three foreigners, against more than 200 terrorist prisoners, forgetting the representatives of the state," he added. Roch March Christian Kabore, president of neighbouring Burkina Faso, told France 24 and RFI radio that the hostages' release had come "at a high price" in an interview broadcast Thursday. One of the men released in exchange was the suspected mastermind of a 2016 jihadist attack that killed 30 in Burkina's capital Ouagadougou. The prisoner release happened under an interim government due to govern Mali for 18 months before staging elections, after a military junta overthrew president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. The kidnapping of former opposition leader Cisse was one of the factors that fuelled popular protests which led to the ouster of Keita over his perceived inability to tackle jihadists and the Islamist insurgency. Only 17 percent of civil administrators were present in northern Mali and the central Mopti region as of August 31 due to insecurity in those areas, according to the latest quarterly report on Mali by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. kt-sst/erc/tgb
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