French soldiers operating in troubled northern Mali came under attack in the Gao region on Sunday, according to Western and Malian military sources.

France is to send a contingent of counterterror forces to help the army in Niger after militants ambushed a military patrol killing 16, the defense ministry said. 

Voters in Mali will be asked to go to the polls in local elections across the vast Sahel nation in November, despite the threat of attacks by armed Islamists, the government has announced.

At a meeting led Wednesday by President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, the cabinet "adopted a draft decree on convening (the electorate), opening and closing the electoral campaign for ... electing local councillors," an official statement said.

Three demonstrators were killed in northern Mali on Tuesday, a medical source said, in a protest centered on a contentious peace accord that Mali has been struggling to enact.

Al-Qaida's North African branch has claimed attacks in northern Mali that killed a Chinese U.N. peacekeeper and three civilians, the U.S.-based monitoring group SITE said Wednesday.

The attacks on Tuesday come days after five U.N. peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in central Mali, as concern grows over the future of the U.N.'s deadliest active mission.

The U.N. on Thursday said five Chadian peacekeepers had been killed and three others wounded during an ambush in northeastern Mali, raising concern over the rising body count of its mission in the country.

The attack, which took place on Wednesday, occurred as the soldiers were escorting a convoy in Aguelhok in the Kidal region. They hit a landmine and then came under sustained gunfire, according to a statement on the U.N. Mali mission's social media accounts.

A Mauritanian man suspected of planning and carrying out several recent deadly attacks on popular tourist venues in Mali has been arrested in the Malian capital Bamako, security sources told AFP Friday.

The suspect is believed to have been involved in several recent attacks, including two in March and November last year that were claimed by jihadists and left more than 20 people dead.

Three Red Cross workers captured in northeastern Mali last weekend by Islamist group Ansar Dine have been freed, the ICRC said Friday.

"The best news we could get: our three colleagues in Mali are free, safe and sound," ICRC head Peter Maurer said on his Twitter account, with the news confirmed by ICRC spokesman in Bamako Valery Mbaoh Nana.

Islamist group Ansar Dine said Thursday it was holding three Red Cross workers captured in northeastern Mali last weekend and called for the release of a jihadist arrested by French troops for their safe return.

"We have three people who work for the Red Cross. We want Barkhane (French forces) to free Miyatene Ag Mayaris before we will release them," Nourredine Ag Mohamed, a senior militant in the group, told Agence France Presse.

Security forces in Mali said Tuesday they were hunting a fugitive gunman wounded in a failed attack on the headquarters of the European Union's military training mission in the capital.

"We are looking for a wounded terrorist, who ran off," a Malian security source told AFP, adding that one of two suspects arrested following Monday's attempted attack was a person "of interest" to the ongoing investigation.