Special agents are holding three people suspected of helping armed jihadists launch an attack on a nightclub in Mali's capital in which five people died, government sources said Thursday.

The arrests came 12 days after assailants with grenades and automatic rifles struck La Terrasse, a favored nightspot among Westerners in Bamako, killing three Malians, a Frenchman and a Belgian.

Five people including two Europeans and a Malian police officer were killed in an assault on a Bamako nightclub Saturday, in the first suspected attack targeting Westerners in a city braced for jihadist violence since 2012.

At least one masked gunman entered the club in an area of the Malian capital popular with expatriates around 1:00 am (0100 GMT) and sprayed the venue with automatic gunfire and threw grenades, witnesses said.

The U.N. Security Council called Tuesday for an immediate end to violence in northern Mali after more than 30 people were killed in fighting between rebels and the army in a flashpoint town.

Tuareg separatists clashed with Malian soldiers in Kidal during a visit by Prime Minister Moussa Mara, whose government is backed by French soldiers who have helped dislodge rebels and armed Islamic extremists from northern towns. 

President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita warned Monday that "odious crimes" that have left more than 30 people dead in northern Mali would not go unpunished even as Tuareg rebels released civil servants taken hostage in a deadly siege at government offices there.

A Malian soldier was killed and 46 others were injured Thursday when their military transporter crashed, the army said.

The accident in the capital Bamako "occurred due to a technical fault in the vehicle," said army spokesman Souleymane Maiga.

Malian security services have broken up a cell in the capital Bamako operated by one of the Islamist groups that had controlled northern Mali until a French-led military intervention this year, a police source said Sunday.

The security services arrested seven people last month when they smashed the cell belonging to the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, (MUJAO), the source told Agence France Presse.

Amnesty International said Wednesday that armed Tuaregs and Islamists, who seized northern Mali after a coup, had carried out grave rights abuses such as rape, murder and using child soldiers.

A report released by the London-based rights group said soldiers had also carried out extrajudicial killings, branding the crisis Mali's worst human rights situation in 50 years.