Suspected Tuareg rebels occupy north Mali town

BAMAKO, May 23 (Reuters) Suspected Tuareg rebels occupied a remote desert town in northern Mali today, seizing several army camps and killing at least two government soldiers, witnesses and security sources said.

The attackers, believed to be led by a high-ranking Tuareg deserter from the Malian national army, used pickup trucks mounted with machine guns in the early morning assault on Kidal, more than 1,000 km northeast of the capital, Bamako.

''They've taken the whole town,'' Jean Pierre Tita, correspondent in Kidal with the Malian state news agency, told Reuters. The attackers had also taken over two local radio stations and seized vehicles, he said.

A military camp in the town of Menaka, 300 km southeast of Kidal, had also been taken, a Malian army spokesman said.

Bursts of gunfire could still be heard hours after the dawn assault on Kidal, from where the Tuaregs - light-skinned turban-clad nomads who complain of neglect by central government -- staged revolts in the 1960s and again in the early 1990s.

''I have seen the bodies of two dead soldiers and four seriously wounded whom we can't get to hospital because the town is still occupied,'' Kidal's police commissioner, Mady Fofana, told Reuters by telephone.

Initially backed by Libya, the Tuaregs took up arms in 1990 demanding greater autonomy before a peace deal, which was never fully implemented, ended the revolt two years later.

Some desert fighters were drafted into the Malian national army but sporadic unrest and banditry has continued among former fighters who still feel economically marginalised in a region awash with arms and largely beyond central government control.

SEAT OF REBELLION A military source, who asked not to be named, said the attackers were believed to be partisans of Lt-Col Hassan Fagaga, a senior army officer and former Tuareg rebel who deserted his post with a group of men in February.

The attacks came a month after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi visited Kidal and opened a consular office in the town.

They also came as Irish rock star and campaigner Bono visited Mali as part of a tour of Africa to drum up development aid for the world's poorest continent.

The Tuaregs have in the past used the threat of rebellion to win a greater measure of political power in Kidal. Analysts said it was unclear whether the latest attacks were meant as another warning shot to the government or the start of a new revolt.

''If there is a real deep-seated resentment across the board then the Malian government is not in a good position to deal with it,'' one regional analyst said, asking not to be named.

''There is so much weaponry up there that you could get just handfuls of guys who could do quite a lot of damage.'' An army battalion had been dispatched from Gao, about 300 km southwest of Kidal, to try to liberate the town, military officials said.

Fearing the infiltration of Islamic militants from Algeria in the north, particularly in the region around Gao and Kidal, the United States has been helping to train the Malian army in anti-terrorism tactics.

But analysts said whereas previous militant attacks in the region tended to have been hit-and-run strikes, the taking over of military camps in today's assault looked more like an act of domestic rebellion.

REUTERS SHR ND1930