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Ammon News - By AL ARABIYA WITH AFP

Malian Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra has resigned hours after he was arrested as he tried to leave the country, the AFP news agency reported, citing national broadcaster ORTM.

“I, Cheik Modibo Diarra, I resign with my government,” Diarra declared in a brief speech given at the premises of, and aired by, ORTM.

He gave no reason for his decision.

Earlier, a source in his entourage told AFP the prime minister had been arrested by about “20 soldiers who came from Kati”, a military barracks outside Bamako and headquarters of the former putschists.

“They said Captain Sanogo sent them to arrest him,” he added, referring to the leader of the March coup.

The source, who witnessed the arrest, said the soldiers had “smashed in the door of the prime minister’s residence and took him away a bit violently.”

But the country's ex-junta spokesman said Tuesday that Diarra's resignation after his arrest by soldiers was not a coup and a new premier will be named soon.

"This is not a new coup d'etat," Bakary Mariko told France 24 television, after Diarra's arrest on the orders of Mariko's boss, former coup leader Amadou Sanogo.

Mariko said Diarra was "not a man of duty" and added that a successor will "be named in the coming hours by the president."

Diarra was named as prime minister in an interim government just weeks after a disastrous March coup that plunged the once stable democracy into a crisis which has seen over half its territory seized by hardline Islamists.

The 60-year-old is a staunch advocate of plans to send a west African intervention force into the occupied territory to drive out the extremists who are running the zone according to their brutal interpretation of sharia, or Islamic, law.

Looking drawn and speaking in solemn tones, Diarra thanked his supporters and expressed the hope that “the new team” would succeed in their task in a country where the north is controlled by armed Islamists linked to al-Qaeda.

Diarra, a noted astrophysicist who has worked on several NASA space programs and served as Microsoft chairman for Africa, was due to leave for Paris for a medical check-up.

He cancelled plans to head to the airport when he learned his baggage had been taken off the plane meant to take him to France.