Still image from video show a hostage rushed out from the Radisson hotel in Bamako, Mali, November 20, 2015.[Photo/Agencies]

CAIRO - An African Jihadist group affiliated with al-Qaida claimed responsibility on Friday for the attack and ongoing hostage-taking at a business hotel in the Malian capital Bamako.

Al-Mourabitoun, a group based in northern Mali and made up mostly of Tuaregs and Arabs, posted a message on Twitter saying it was behind the attack on the Radisson Blu hotel, where hostages are still being held.

The claim could not immediately be verified.

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Malian special forces stormed a luxury hotel in Bamako on Friday after Islamist gunmen took 170 people including many foreigners hostage.

"They've penetrated inside the hotel. The operations are under way," a police source told Reuters.

State television said 80 hostages had been freed but the French newspaper Le Monde quoted the Malian security ministry as saying at least three people had been killed in the initial attack. A witness outside the hotel said gunfire could be heard from time to time.

A senior security source said the gunmen had burst into Radisson Blu hotel at 7 a.m. (0700 GMT), firing and shouting "Allahu Akbar", or "God is great" in Arabic, and begun working their way through the building, room by room and floor by floor.

Some hostages escaped under their own steam while others were freed after showing they could recite verses from the Koran, one security source said.

Twelve Air France flight crew were in the hotel, but all were extracted safely, the French national carrier said.

A Turkish official said three of six Turkish Airlines staff who had been in the hotel had managed to flee.

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua said several Chinese tourists were among those trapped inside the building.

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita cut short a trip to a regional summit in Chad to return to Bamako, his office said. French President Francois Hollande said France would "use all the means available to us on the ground to free the hostages".

The raid on the hotel, which lies just west of the city centre near government ministries and diplomatic offices, comes a week after Islamic State militants killed 129 people in Paris.