Nine soldiers were killed in an attack near the central Malian town of Bandiagara, in an area where jihadist groups are rampant, a military official said on Friday. Army and local officials had earlier spoken of a death toll of eight in the attack on a gendarmerie post which took place on Thursday night. Nine Malian soldiers were also wounded, five of them seriously, according to a military official who declined to be named. A local official also said there was a long exchange of fire with a large number of jihadists. Mali has been plunged in violence since 2012, when jihadists first rebelled in the north of the Sahel state. The fighting has since spread to central Mali, as well as neighbourking Burkina Faso and Niger -- killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands more. But ethnically diverse central Mali has become the epicentre of the conflict, where where tit-for-tat community killings are common, and jihadists regularly attack troops. sd-kt/siu/txw/ri/eml