Mali summons Russian ambassador over rebels' Moscow trip

Bamako (AFP) - Mali said on Tuesday it had summoned the Russian ambassador in Bamako to explain why Moscow agreed to meet members of an armed separatist group from the west African nation.

A delegation from the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA), led by its political head Bilal Ag Acherif, met Russian deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov on Friday last week in Moscow, the rebel group said in a statement.

Malian Foreign Minister Zahabi Ould Sidi Mohamed told AFP he had called in ambassador Alexei Doulian on Monday to explain "the parameters of the stay of an armed group in Russia".

"He insisted that his country recognises the territorial integrity of Mali and the approach of his country is not at all a recognition of the MNLA," Mohamed said.

Azawad is the name Tuareg and Arab minorities use for Mali's vast desert north, where they are concentrated.

The country, which straddles the continent's Saharan and sub-Saharan regions, exploded into crisis in 2012 when the MNLA launched a rebellion claiming Azawad as an independent state.

Al-Qaeda-linked Islamist groups seized on the chaos created by the rebellion and a coup in Bamako to take control of northern Mali, ruling it under a brutal version of Islamic law until former colonial ruler France sent in troops to flush them out in January 2013.

The country restored democracy through the election of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita but the MNLA and other armed groups are still calling for autonomy for the north.

"There could be no territory within a territory, two countries in Mali. Mali is one and indivisible, and in that the Russian ambassador to Mali is in agreement with us," Mohamed told AFP.