Gunmen abduct Malian soldiers in Sahara - ministry

BAMAKO, Aug 27 (Reuters) Suspected Tuareg gunmen abducted about 20 Malian soldiers in a remote Saharan town and took them off towards Niger, where the nomadic tribesmen are fighting a rebellion, a ministry spokesman said today.

Tuareg uprisings gripped northern Mali and Niger in the 1990s before a string of peace deals, but recent months have seen a surge in violence, particularly in Niger where Tuareg-led rebels have killed over 40 government troops since February.

On Sunday in Mali, gunmen overpowered a group of around 25 soldiers on market day in a remote town in the far northeast of the country near the border with Niger, a spokesman for Mali's Territorial Administration Ministry said.

The gunmen later released a handful of the soldiers who were of Tuareg origin and led the rest of the group off in the direction of Niger, the spokesman added.

Many former Tuareg rebel fighters were recruited to government forces under the 1990s peace deals.

The lightly armed soldiers were accompanying a delegation from the Agriculture Ministry who were visiting the area as part of efforts to combat swarms of locusts which sometimes devour crops across Africa's arid Sahel, the spokesman said.

The mountainous area where Sunday's abduction happened is regarded as a stronghold of Tuareg rebel leader Ibrahima Bahanga, whom Malian authorities accuse of killing a gendarme in an attack in May.

At the time, Mali said Bahanga was helped in that attack by light-skinned Tuareg rebels from Niger, where the rebel Niger Movement for Justice (MNJ) launched an uprising in February in the northern area where foreign companies mine uranium.

Bahanga has been disowned by a broader Malian rebel alliance, the Democratic Alliance for Change, which signed a deal with President Amadou Toumani Toure in July 2006 to end a resurgence of violence by ethnic militias demanding greater autonomy from the black African-led government in the south.

Last week, Mali and Niger's security ministers met in the eastern Malian town of Gao and signed a deal allowing each others' security forces to pursue suspected bandits across their common border.

In Niger, the MNJ rebels are holding hostage 30 or so soldiers who were captured as part of a larger group in June in a bloody raid on an army post that killed 15 soldiers.

Niger has accused France's state uranium miner Areva and ''rich foreign powers'' of backing the rebellion. At the weekend, Niger imposed a state of alert in the north, and appealed to Sudan and Libya for help to end the insurgency.

In an interview filmed during a visit to Tripoli and screened on Malian state television at the weekend, Mali's Toure said he had agreed with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to organise a regional summit of heads of state in the coming weeks or months to discuss security in the Sahara and Sahel regions.

REUTERS SY KP2331