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By Tiemoko Diallo

BAMAKO, May 11 (Reuters) - Tuareg rebels in Mali, accompanied by Tuaregs from neighbouring Niger, killed a military police officer in an attack on a Saharan outpost on Friday, the first such raid since a peace deal last year.

The assault against the gendarmerie post at Tin-Za, north of the town of Kidal and just 3 km (2 miles) from the Algerian border, was led by Ibrahim Bahanga, a well-known Malian Tuareg insurgent chief, the territorial administration ministry said.

"The attack took place at dawn ... It is Bahanga leading rebels from Niger," the ministry said in a statement.

A senior government official said one gendarme had been killed in the attack and five wounded. He said the post numbered around 10 men and the Malian army was pursuing the attackers.

The light-skinned Tuaregs, whose ancestral Saharan lands were split between Niger, Mali, Algeria and Libya as African nations gained independence in the 1960s, have long demanded greater autonomy from black African-dominated governments.

Tuaregs launched full-scale rebellions in Mali and Niger in the 1990s and the southern Sahara has remained a hotbed of banditry ever since, awash with arms, hobbled by unemployment and largely beyond central police control.

Malian army spokesman Colonel Abdoulaye Coulibaly said Friday's attackers appeared to be a splinter group disowned by the broader Democratic Alliance for Change rebels, who signed a peace deal with Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure last July.

He said members of the Alliance were working with Malian soldiers sent from the Saharan trading town of Kidal -- for generations the seat of the Tuareg rebellion -- to hunt down the attackers.

Comments posted on a Tuareg Webforum, www.kidal.info, voiced little support for Ibrahim Bahanga's attack and noted the men he was leading were Tuaregs from Niger, not Mali.

"We can guarantee that Ibrahim is completely isolated. He is with no elements of the Alliance and the Alliance is taking all the measures it can to fight him," wrote one blogger, who gave his name as Tighar Ghar.

Mali has had more success recently than Niger in containing the threat from Tuareg insurgents.

Last July's peace deal, promising development for the north and brokered by Algeria, was a political coup for President Toure, winning him support from Tuareg leaders in presidential elections last month which handed him a second term in office.

By contrast, Tuareg fighters in Niger have stepped up attacks in recent weeks, raiding a French-run uranium mine in the north of the country last month, killing one soldier. (Additional reporting by Nick Tattersall in Dakar)

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