JNN 29 Dec 2012 Bamako: A tourism official says that Wahabi Terrorist under the Umbrella of US Sponsored Al Qaeda  destroyed four mausoleums in Timbuktu. Radical Wahabis controlling the north in Mali have sent death threats to several senior Muslim chiefs in the country, officials said on Thursday.

One of the people to receive the threats is Cherif Ousmane Madani Haidara, who heads a Muslim association that groups tens of thousands of followers.

Haidara “has received numerous death threats by phone over the past several days, either directly or through those close to him”, said close aide Ousmane Diallo.

“It’s the Islamists in the north who telephoned,” he charged, adding that one of the callers said: “We are going to kill you because you want nothing to do with our Islam… we are going to kill you because you don’t want sharia in Mali.”

Haidara heads a Muslim association called Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), which is the same name as one of the radical Islamist groups that have seized control of the north of the country following a March coup.

“We have nothing to do with the Ansar Dine of the north. We condemn the hands that they are chopping,” Haidara had previously said, referring to the amputations of hands of accused robbers that Islamist groups in the north have carried out.

“We condemn their Islam,” he said.

While most of Malian Muslims follow the Sufi brand of Islam, the Islamists controlling the north adhere to the radical Wahhabi tradition.

Underscoring the stark differences between the two groups, the Wahabis this week destroyed more Muslim mausoleums that they consider blasphemous in the fabled city of Timbuktu.

Other Muslim chiefs who said they had also received death threats recently are Mohammad Macky Ba, the president of the Young Mali Muslims union, Mahamadou Diallo, an imam in Bamako, as well as Thierno Hady Thiam, another Muslim preacher.

An official with the Mali security ministry said that the ministry was aware of the death threats and that it had taken “all necessary security precautions to assure the protection of the people threatened”.

A tourism official says that Wahabi Terrorist under the Umbrella of US Sponsored Al Qaeda  destroyed four mausoleums in Timbuktu Sunday.

The director of Mali’s Timbuktu tourism office, Sane Chirfi, said that Ansar Dine rebels linked to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb ( East ) tore down the mausoleums, which were historic but not included on the United Nations list of World Heritage sites. The mausoleums housed the remains of Muslim scholars and teachers who are revered by the Timbuktu population.

Since taking control of Timbuktu earlier this year, the Wahabi Terrorist have destroyed seven of the 16 mausoleums listed as world heritage sites. Some date back to the 14th century.

According to many residents, the destruction of the graves is the rebels’ reaction to the recent U.N. resolution calling for an international military intervention to remove the Islamists from northern Mali.