Bamako, Oct 29 (AFP) Suspected jihadists have freed at least five teachers kidnapped last week at their school in central Mali for using French in the classroom, a government statement has said.

"The government is grateful for the good will involved for the freeing of the hostages," the statement said on Monday, without detailing the conditions of the release.

Local sources said six teachers were abducted, while the government said five were snatched from the school in Korientze, some 150 kilometres (95 miles) north of the regional capital Mopti, on Friday.

A municipal council member said the attackers were "numerous, armed and on motorcycles".

The council member, who requested anonymity for security reasons, added that the gunmen set fire to school manuals and notebooks in the schoolyard.

One teacher told AFP that the attackers threatened to return if teaching "according to the principles of Islam" did not replace classes taught in French.

More than 900 schools have closed in the former French colony, one of the world's poorest countries.

More than two-thirds of the schools operated in central regions that since 2012 have witnessed insurrections by separatists, Salafists and jihadists, interlaced with inter-ethnic violence.

The northern part of the semi-desert West African state came under the control of Al-Qaeda linked jihadists after Mali's army failed to quash a Tuareg rebellion in 2012. The following year, a French-led military campaign was launched against the jihadists, pushing them back.

But the jihadists regrouped and widened their trademark hit-and-run raids and road mine attacks to central and southern Mali and from there into Burkina Faso and Niger, where they often fan existing inter-communal strife which has left hundreds dead. (AFP)

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