THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The image of a severed hand lying beside a bloodied sword was passed from one mobile phone to the next.
The 25-year-old man had been held down while the hand was cut off before a crowd of appalled onlookers, recalled Mousa Ag-Mohammed, 29, who witnessed this punishment. "Some people said that he stole something, but it was not true," he said. "They wanted to do this just to frighten people, for the people to be scared of them."
Whatever the reason, the footage showed how the Islamist overlords of the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu had united high technology with medieval cruelty during their occupation.
Indeed terror was Mr Ag-Mohammed's dominant memory of the 10-month occupation of Timbuktu that ended with a lightning French assault on Monday. » | David Blair, Timbuktu | Friday, February 01, 2013
