Gunmen have killed eight people in central Mali, a local official and security ministry staffer said on Wednesday, in the latest violence to hit the war-torn Sahel state.

Militants attacked a minibus which was travelling between the towns of Bandiagara and Bankass in central Mali’s volatile Mopti region on Tuesday, a region which is prone to frequent jihadist attacks and ethnic killings, the officials said.

“Armed men opened fire on the minibus,” a local government official told AFP, adding that eight people died, four escaped and eight were seriously wounded, three of them children.

An official from Mali’s security ministry, who also requested anonymity, confirmed the details of the attack and the death toll.

The local government official, and a survivor interviewed by AFP, both blamed the attack on jihadists.

Mali has been struggling to contain a jihadist insurgency that emerged in the north in 2012 and prompted a military intervention by France.

The extremists were rooted in the French operation but regrouped. Today large stretches of the landlocked African state remain outside of government control.

Fighting, which has sometimes taken on an ethnic dimension, has since spread to the centre of the country and neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have had to flee their homes.

Tuesday’s attack occurred near the border with Burkina Faso, a region where militants also killed 12 Malian soldiers in a raid in mid-October.

Anger at the conflict fuelled protests against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, culminating in his ouster in a military coup on August 18.

(AFP)