A Frenchman in his seventies was recovering from bullet wounds yesterday after surviving an attack by gunmen who killed his two adult sons, his brother and a friend at a desert roadside in southern Mauritania.

François Tauler suffered severe leg wounds when three gunmen fired on his family group with Kalashnikov assault rifles at about midday on Monday. The five, from the Paris region, were travelling in two 4x4 vehicles on their way to Mali and then Burkina Faso. They stopped at Aleg, 180 miles (290km) southeast of Nouakchott, the capital, to withdraw money.

The group then stopped to picnic by the roadside about 12 miles outside the town when three men in turbans drove up in an old Mercedes car. They demanded money before shooting them, the Mauritanian Interior Ministry said. Two men and a woman were detained within hours as the Mauritanian Government ordered a heavy security operation but the gunmen were believed to have escaped across the border into Senegal.

French diplomats said that the attack appeared to have been carried out by robbers rather than political or religious extremists although two of the gang were linked to al-Qaeda by local prosecutors.

The incident was the latest involving French tourists travelling without escort in remote parts of Africa but it was the first involving Mauritania, a relatively stable democracy on the western rim of the Sahara.

Travellers are told to avoid the far eastern and northern reaches of the Sahara, where thinly stretched security forces struggle to control drug and weapons traffickers. The area around Aleg is not known for lawlessness but travellers are advised to seek escorts.

Tour operators and the Foreign Ministry repeated warnings directed at adventure tourists to avoid taking unnecessary risks. The Tauler family appeared to have neglected basic precautions, according to media reports.

The incident is a blow to Mauritania’s efforts to promote tourism. In two weeks, contestants in the annual Lisbon-Dakar rally are due to drive through the area on the way to Senegal. Two French tourists were killed this month when their hot-air balloons burst during a trip organised by a French adventure tourism company.

President Sarkozy voiced his concern in a telephone call with Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, President of the former French colony. The Mauritan-ian leader promised that his country would make every effort to arrest those responsible for the attack. The Interior Ministry said that it “regrets and condemns this criminal act that contradicts our values of tolerance”.

Algerian-based Islamic extremists have become increasingly active in northern Africa. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which was formerly known as the Salafist Group, has long been linked to smuggling and extortion in Mauritania, and Mali and Niger to the east. In September al-Qaeda’s second-in-command called for North African Muslims to cleanse their land of Spaniards and French to restore “al-Andulus” — the parts of the Iberian Peninsula that were under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages.

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