French armed forces have killed a top jihadist leader in an air and ground ambush in Mali, the government said on Friday, ending a years-long hunt for a man accused of masterminding the kidnapping of Westerners in the Sahel region.

Djamel Okacha, an Algerian commander in Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was killed on Thursday after French commandos, helicopters and a drone hit a column of vehicles he was travelling in north of Timbuktu, French officials said. Okacha, a jihadist veteran known also as Yahya Abou El Hamame, was "the mastermind and financer of several attacks," the defence ministry said.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019