Malian troops have discovered a mass grave close to military base French forces handed back to the Malian army just days ago in Gossi.

The Gossi military base in the north of the country was handed over to the Forces Armées Maliennes (FAMa) on Tuesday as part of the French forces’ planned exit from the country.

Paris plans to end its failed almost decade-long military operation under the pretext of eradicating terrorist groups wreaking havoc in the Sahel country.

The army general staff revealed in a statement that “bodies in a state of advanced putrefaction were discovered in a mass grave, not far from the camp formerly occupied by the French force Barkhane.”

“The state of advanced putrefaction of the bodies indicates that this mass grave existed well before the handover. Consequently, the responsibility for this act can in no way be attributed to the FAMa,” the statement said.

The defense ministry has been assigned to conduct an investigation into the mass killings.

France and the United States were quick to blame Russian forces deployed in Mali for the killings.

The French army claimed Russian fighters buried bodies near the Gossi base with the intention of framing the French for the killings, according to French and American news agencies.

Leaders of West Africa’s Sahel region have abandoned their hopes in purported counter-terrorism efforts by France and started negotiating with armed militants to bring peace to the restive region.

France’s exit from Mali came as swathes of territory remained under the control of rebel militants linked to al-Qaeda and Daesh.

The Sahel, a semi-arid stretch of land south of the Sahara desert, has been in turmoil since 2012, when a number of armed separatists started targeting the local population in Mali.

As a former colonial power seeking significant military presence in Africa, France decided to send thousands of soldiers in 2013 to try to prevent separatist forces from reaching Mali’s capital, Bamako.

France increased the number of its forces in the Sahel from 600 to 5,100 soldiers for its Operation Barkhane last year.

However, the military boost failed to bring the situation under control and the UN also deployed its peacekeeping forces to the region.

Militant groups with links to al-Qaeda and Daesh have strengthened their foothold across the region.

This has made the territory ungovernable, stoking ethnic violence, especially in neighboring countries Mali and Burkina Faso. The French Barkhane force is also involved in Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, and Mauritania.

Culled from Presstv

Four French tourists and one Belgian were among 10 people killed in a bus crash Wednesday in Egypt, whose travel industry is only just emerging from years of political upheaval and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fourteen others — eight French and six Belgians — were taken to hospital with “broken bones, bruises and superficial injuries” but all were in a stable condition, the governor of the southern province of Aswan said.

The other five people killed were all Egyptian — the bus driver, his assistant and the tour guide, as well as two people in the other vehicle, a statement from the public prosecution said.

The Belgian foreign ministry confirmed to AFP that one of its citizens died and others were injured.

The accident occurred early Wednesday morning when the bus collided with a pick-up as it was transporting the tourists on the 300 kilometre (186 mile) road journey between Aswan and the famed Abu Simbel temple further south.

An AFP photographer saw what remained of the burnt-out vehicles lying by the roadside.

The prosecution ordered an “urgent investigation” to determine “the cause and circumstances of the accident and those responsible”.

Crashes are relatively common in Egypt, where many roads are in disrepair and traffic regulations frequently ignored.

Some 7,000 people died in road accidents in the country in 2020, according to official figures.

Vital tourism industry

The Abu Simbel temple was moved from its original location in the 1960s under the rule of president Gamal Abdel Nasser to make way for the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

Egypt had begun reviving its vital tourism industry by promoting its ancient heritage, after the country’s 2011 revolution and ensuing unrest struck the sector.

But the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the subsequent global travel bans resulted in a plunge in tourism revenues to $4 billion, from $13 billion the previous year.

The sector employs some two million people in a country of 103 million and generates more than 10 percent of GDP.

In August 2021 Russia resumed flights to Egyptian resorts, six years after a Russian airliner crashed after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has yet again cut off much of the flow of tourists to Egypt, as the two countries accounted for about 40 percent of visitors prior to the war.

The current administration of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has invested heavily in promoting tourism, and has organised major events in a bid to attract visitors.

Last year, the North African country staged a procession of floats carrying the mummified remains of 22 pharaohs, including Egypt’s most powerful ancient queen, to a new resting place in Cairo.

Since the start of April, visitors from dozens of additional countries have been permitted to obtain visas on arrival to Egypt, rather than applying in advance.

While attacks on tourists have largely ceased since they peaked in the 1990s, deadly incidents have occurred.

And in February 2019, a German woman and two Egyptian children were killed when a building collapsed in a residential neighbourhood of the southern city of Luxor.

Source: AFP

Burkina Faso’s former president Blaise Compaoré was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment over his role in the 1987 murder of his predecessor Thomas Sankara, a military court ruled on Wednesday, wrapping up a six-month trial that was disrupted by a coup.

An iconic figure sometimes dubbed the “African Che Guevara”, Sankara was just 33 when he came to power in a coup in 1983, setting in motion a revolution that pledged to “decolonise African minds” and continues to inspire followers across the continent.

The short-lived experiment came to a brutal end on October 15, 1987, when he and 12 colleagues were gunned down by a hit squad during a meeting at the presidential palace in Ouagadougou. The massacre coincided with a coup that took Sankara’s erstwhile comrade Compaoré to power.

On Wednesday, the special court in Ouagadougou ruled that Compaoré was guilty of complicity in Sankara’s murder, sentencing him and his former head of security, Hyacinthe Kafando, to life in jail.

Prosecutors had demanded a 30-year jail term for Compaoré, who was deposed in a 2014 popular uprising and now lives in exile in neighbouring Ivory Coast since his ouster. The former president, who denounced a “political trial”, was tried in absentia on counts of attacking state security, concealing a corpse and complicity in a murder.

Throughout his 27-year reign, Compaoré clamped a tight lid on the circumstances of Sankara’s demise, fuelling speculation that he was the mastermind. It was only after his ouster in a popular uprising in 2014 that Sankara’s remains were exhumed, paving the way for the long-waited trial.

International ‘conspiracy’

One of the world’s poorest countries, Burkina Faso has a long history of political turmoil and is battling a jihadist insurgency that has claimed some 2,000 lives and displaced up to 1.8 million people.

Reflecting the turmoil, the trial was briefly suspended after a coup on January 24 that deposed the elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. It resumed after a new military strongman, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, restored the constitution and swore an oath.

Tensions between Sankara and his erstwhile ally Compaoré were described in detail during the six-month proceedings, with several witnesses pointing to an “international conspiracy” to remove a troublesome leader who was not afraid to challenge the world order and rebuke France, the former colonial power.

“The tragedy of October 15, 1987 was a result of pressure exerted by a number of heads of state, including Félix Houphouët Boigny,” said Abdoul Salam Kaboré, a sports minister under Sankara, referring to Ivory Coast’s former ruler and a key French ally.

Speaking via video-link from France, Sankara’s former close aide Moussa Diallo said there was no doubt the assassination “was premeditated” and that Houphouët Boigny “was at the heart of the plot”.

The longtime Ivorian leader once told Sankara, “[y]ou have to change, and if you don’t, we will change you,” Serge Théophile Balima, a former head of Burkina Faso’ state TV, testified in court.

In its closing statement, the prosecution recounted in grim detail the day Sankara was murdered by a hit squad that burst into a meeting of his National Revolutionary Council meeting, killing his guards.

“The squad then ordered president Sankara and his colleagues to leave the room,” the prosecution said. “They would then be killed one by one.”

Ballistics experts told the trial Sankara had been shot in the chest at least seven times by assassins using tracer rounds. At least one bullet was fired in his back.

The defendants had claimed the victims died in a botched attempt to arrest Sankara after he and Compaore fell out over the direction the country’s revolution was taking.

During the trial, “none of the accused confessed or repented – not a single one!” said Prosper Farama, a lawyer representing the Sankara family, adding that the family wanted “justice, not revenge”.

‘Pride of Africa’

While Sankara’s death put an end to his revolution, the premature and brutal manner of his demise would help cement the legend of a progressive leader who sought to empower the people in a continent blighted by colonial plunder and mismanagement.

Sankara followed in the footsteps of previous pan-African icons, including the likes of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara told FRANCE 24 at the start of the trial.

“His originality was to defend the principle of people’s emancipation, rather than the emancipation of states. He called on the people of Africa to join forces around regional struggles, such as fighting desertification, and around continental challenges, like ending debt bondage,” Boukari-Yabara explained.

“On matters of governance, women’s rights, fighting forced marriage and female gential mutilation, climate and culture, he was a pioneer,” he added. “His assassination clearly marked the end of revolutionary pan-Africanism.”

The man who renamed the former French colony of Haute-Volta as Burkina Faso – meaning the “Land of the Honest”, or “Upright” – was ahead of his time in recognising climate change and desertification as the single biggest threat to the wellbeing of its people.

“The desert is at our gates, it’s already upon us, ready to engulf us,” he warned as he launched a massive tree-planting drive to “regreen” the country, halt soil erosion and foster sustainable agriculture. More than three decades after his death, his vision of a “wall of trees” holding back the encroaching desert has taken root in a pan-African project of breathtaking scale, a cross-continental barrier stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.

None of this was possible without the liberation of women, Sankara would stress in his fiery speeches up and down the country, pointing out that women “carry the other half of the sky” – on top of the wood that fuels stoves and cookers and the water that feeds their families, their crops and their livestock.

“May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence,” he once said. “I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.”

That spirit has outlived Burkina Faso’s revolutionary captain, said Serge Ouédraogo, a high-school teacher in the capital, Ouagadougou – outshining the darker aspects of Sankara’s legacy, including his efforts to silence dissenters.

“Sankara is a whole philosophy, a way of thinking and living. He’s the pride of Africa,” Ouédraogo told AFP. “Today we can say that Sankara is a compass for the people of Burkina Faso. He’s a guide, the one who charts a path of hope for the people.”

Source: France 24

At least twelve soldiers were killed Sunday in eastern Burkina Faso by suspected jihadists, security sources told AFP, the sixth attack of its kind in the country in ten days.

“On Sunday, armed elements attacked a (military) unit around Natiaboani. The provisional toll is twelve fallen soldiers,” a security source told AFP.

“This was a patrol and security team that were attacked by presumed jihadists,” another security source told AFP, adding that around ten soldiers had been killed.

“Multiple elements on the enemy side were also neutralised,” they said, without giving further details.

Natiaboani is a rural community about sixty kilometres south of Fada N’Gourma, the largest town in the Eastern Region administrative area that since 2018 has been regularly targeted by armed groups.

Around 15 youths were kidnapped by armed individuals during an attack on Friday in nearby Nagre, according to the country’s information agency.

Burkina Faso has seen an uptick in violence after a period of relative calm following a military junta taking power in January.

Disgruntled officers toppled elected president Roch Marc Christian Kabore, who had been facing protests over his handling of the bloody jihadist insurgency.

In total, 23 civilians and 25 policemen or soldiers have been killed over the last ten days.

Burkina Faso has been struggling with jihadist attacks since 2015, when militants linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group began mounting cross-border raids from Mali.

The violence has killed more than 2,000 people and displaced at least 1.7 million, according to an AFP tally.

In January alone, 160,000 fled their homes, a group of international charities said last Thursday.

Source: AFP

Mali’s army-led government asked France on Friday to withdraw its troops from the Sahel state “without delay”, calling into question Paris’ plans to pull out over several months.

A government spokesman added in a statement announced on public television that the results of France’s nine-year military engagement in conflict-torn Mali were “not satisfactory”.

On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he was withdrawing troops from Mali after a breakdown in relations with the nation’s ruling military junta.

Relations between the two countries deteriorated sharply after Mali’s army seized power in a coup in 2020, and later defied calls to restore civilian rule swiftly.

The French pullout after nearly a decade is also set to see the smaller European Takuba force of special forces, created in 2020, leave Mali.

France currently has some 5,000 troops deployed across the Sahel as part of its anti-jihadist Barkhane force — the majority  in Mali.

Macron said the withdrawal would take place over four to six months.

Spokesman Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga called the French withdrawal a “flagrant violation” of accords between the two countries.

“In view of these repeated breaches of defence agreements, the government invites the French authorities to withdraw, without delay,” he said.

Source: AFP

France’s top court on Tuesday confirmed that a probe should be closed into the shooting down of a presidential plane that triggered the 1994 Rwanda genocide, ending a two-decade legal saga.

The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal by families of people killed in the missile attack on president Juvenal Habyarimana’s aircraft on April 6, 1994.

They had asked judges to reverse a lower court’s decision to abandon the case against people close to current President Paul Kagame.

Relations between Paris and Kigali had long been strained by the probe and its associated arrest warrants.

“The investigation was complete and sufficient charges did not exist against anyone for committing the alleged crimes, nor any other infraction,” the Court of Cassation found.

The Falcon 50 plane was carrying Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira from a summit in Tanzania, where they had been discussing the crisis in the two countries and continuing negotiations with Kagame, then leader of the mostly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).

Its downing is widely seen as the spark that ignited the genocide in which more than 800,000 people are believed to have died — most from the Tutsi minority at the hands of Hutus.

Rwanda’s representative at the UN said at the time that the plane was shot down by “enemies of the peace,” while the defence ministry said “unidentified elements” were responsible.

Relatives of the French flight crew turned to the courts in 1998.

French investigators long suspected that Kagame’s rebels fired on the flight as it landed in the Rwandan capital.

Later they chased up the theory that Hutu extremists unsatisfied with the moderate Habyarimana were behind the attack, with no more success.

But a French expert report found in 2012 that the plane was hit by missiles fired from a camp occupied by Habyarimana’s own presidential guard.

Defending their dropping the case in December 2018, the investigating magistrates said there was a “lack of indisputable material evidence,” and this left the charges resting on witness accounts that were “mostly contradictory or impossible to verify.”

They also underlined the “detrimental atmosphere” around the case, including killings, disappearances of witnesses and manipulation of testimony.

Source: AFP

Military prosecutors on Tuesday called for a 30-year jail term against Burkina Faso’s former president Blaise Compaore for the 1987 murder of his predecessor, revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara.

The closely-followed trial is heading to a climax as the West African nation reels from its latest coup, following popular anger over jihadist attacks.

Prosecutors asked a military court in the capital Ouagadougou to find Compaore, who fled to Ivory Coast in 2014, guilty on several counts.

Accused of masterminding the assassination, Compaore is being tried in absentia on charges of attacking state security, concealing a corpse and complicity in a murder.

At the request of the defence, the trial was then adjourned until March 1.

Revered among African radicals, Sankara was an army captain aged just 33 when he came to power in a coup in 1983.

The fiery Marxist-Leninist railed against imperialism and colonialism, often angering Western leaders but gaining followers across the continent and beyond.

He and 12 colleagues were gunned down by a hit squad on October 15, 1987, at a meeting of the ruling National Revolutionary Council.

Their assassination coincided with a coup that brought Sankara’s former comrade-in-arms, Compaore, to power.

Compaore ruled for 27 years before being deposed by a popular uprising in 2014 and fleeing to neighbouring Ivory Coast.

Fourteen people stand accused in the trial, 12 of them appearing in court. Most pleaded not guilty.

The prosecution also requested 30 years in jail for the commander of Compaore’s presidential guard, Hyacinthe Kafando, who is suspected of having led the hit squad. He is also being tried in absentia.

It sought a 20-year sentence for Gilbert Diendere, one of the commanders of the army during the 1987 coup and the main defendant present at the trial.

Compaore’s former right-hand man, General Gilbert Diendere, is already serving a 20-year for engineering an attempted putsch in 2015

Compaore’s former right-hand man, General Gilbert Diendere, is already serving a 20-year for engineering an attempted putsch in 2015 OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT AFP

He is already serving a 20-year sentence over an attempted military coup in 2015.

Mariam Sankara, the slain ex-president’s wife, welcomed the prosecution’s plea.

“We’ve been waiting for years,” she said. Now “we’re waiting for the final verdict.”

‘Asking for justice’

The prosecution recounted the day Sankara was killed in its closing statement

It said that when Sankara headed to the National Revolutionary Council meeting, “his executioners were already there”.

According to its version of events, after Sankara entered the meeting room, the hit squad burst in, killing his guards.

“The squad then ordered president Sankara and his colleagues to leave the room. They would then be killed one by one,” the prosecution said.

The prosecution also urged prison sentences ranging from three to 20 years for five other defendants, as well as an 11-year suspended sentence for another.

It sought acquittal over lack of evidence for three of the accused, and cited the expiration of a statute of limitations for the final two.

The trial was already briefly suspended after a coup on January 24 that deposed the elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore.

After new military strongman Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba restored the constitution, the trial resumed last week.

Prosper Farama, the lawyer representing the Sankara family, said that, as the trial nears its end, the families were finally feeling some relief — even though “during this trial, no-one confessed or repented. No-one!”

“We ask the court to give the families justice,” he said. “We don’t want revenge, we’re simply asking for justice.”

Source: AFP

Sustained gunfire was heard on Tuesday near the seat of government in Bissau, the capital of the small coup-prone West African state of Guinea-Bissau, AFP reporters said.

Heavily-armed men surrounded the Palace of Government, where President Umaro Sissoco Embalo and Prime Minister Nuno Gomes Nabiam were believed to have gone to attend a cabinet meeting.

The Palace of Government is on the edge of the capital close to the airport.

People were seen fleeing the area, the local markets were closed and banks shut their doors, while military vehicles laden with troops drove through the streets.

Shortly after the first reports of the gunfire on Tuesday, the West African regional bloc ECOWAS condemned what it described as an attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau.

“ECOWAS is following with great concern the evolution of the situation in Guinea-Bissau…where military gunfire is taking place around the government palace,” the organisation said.

“ECOWAS condemns this attempted coup and holds the military responsible for the safety of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo and members of his government.”

The African Union (AU) said on it was very concerned about what it described as an attempted coup taking place and called on the military in Guinea-Bissau to free detained government members.

“The President of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, is following with grave concern the situation in Guinea-Bissau, consisting of an attempted coup against the country’s government,” the AU said in a statement.

“He calls on the military to return to their barracks without delay and to protect the physical safety of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo and members of his government and to immediately free those of them who are in detention,” it said.

A United Nations spokesman said on Tuesday that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is “deeply concerned” by reports of heavy fighting in Guinea-Bissau and asks for an immediate end to the violence and for full respect of country’s democratic institutions.

The former Portuguese colony, just south of Senegal, is an impoverished coastal state of about two million people.

It has suffered four military putsches since gaining independence in 1974, most recently in 2012.

In 2014, the country vowed to return to constitutional government, but there has been little stability since then, and the armed forces wield substantial clout.

Embalo, a 49-year-old reserve brigadier general and former prime minister, took office in February 2020 after winning a second-round runoff election that followed four years of political infighting under the country’s semi-presidential system.

He was a candidate for a party called Madem, composed of rebels from the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) which had led Guinea-Bissau to independence.

His chief opponent, PAIGC candidate Domingos Simoes Pereira, bitterly contested the result but Embalo declared himself president without waiting for the outcome of his petition to the Supreme Court.

Late last year, the armed forces chief said members of the military had been preparing to launch a coup while the president was on a working trip to Brazil.

Troops had been offering bribes to other soldiers “in order to subvert the established constitutional order”, armed forces head General Biague Na Ntam said on October 14.

His account was denied the following day by the government spokesman.

In addition to volatility, Guinea-Bissau also struggles with a reputation for corruption and drug smuggling.

Its porous coastline and cultural ties have made it an important stop on the Africa trafficking route. In 2019, nearly two tonnes of cocaine were seized.

Three countries in West Africa – Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso – have experienced military takeovers in less than 18 months.

The region’s mounting instability is due to be discussed on Thursday at an ECOWAS summit.

Portugal’s embassy in Guinea-Bissau urged Portuguese citizens to stay at home amid Tuesday’s events.

“The Portuguese embassy in Guinea-Bissau recommends that all Portuguese citizens residing in Guinea-Bissau stay home and wait for further information due to recent events,” the embassy said on its Facebook page.

Source: REUTERS

A long-awaited trial in Burkina Faso over the 1987 assassination of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara is being suspended until “the restoration of the constitution”, a court said Monday, a week after a military coup.

The trial of Sankara’s alleged killers was to resume at a military court in the capital Ouagadougou on Monday.

But Judge Urbain Meda announced the hearing was suspended and told parties “to remain alert for the resumption, which will be after the restoration of the constitution”.

He made the announcement after civil parties in the case called for a suspension pending “judicial normalisation” by Burkina’s new ruling junta.

“Civilian plaintiffs feel that a trial has to take place within a reasonable time, but we do not want a trial (with) flaws,” said lawyer Prosper Farama, representing the Sankara family.

The trial opened last October and has been closely followed by the Burkinabe public.

It has been showcased as the chance to shed light on one of the murkiest chapters in the troubled country’s history.

Revered among African radicals, Sankara was an army captain aged just 33 when he came to power in a coup in 1983.

The fiery Marxist-Leninist railed against imperialism and colonialism, often angering Western leaders but gaining followers across the continent and beyond.

He and 12 of his colleagues were gunned down by a hit squad on October 15, 1987, at a meeting of the ruling National Revolutionary Council.

Their assassination coincided with a coup that brought Sankara’s erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Blaise Compaore, to power.

Compaore ruled for 27 years before being deposed by a popular uprising in 2014 and fleeing to neighbouring Ivory Coast.

Fourteen defendants are on trial, two of them in absentia, including Compaore.

Compaore and his former right-hand man General Gilbert Diendere are charged with harming state security, complicity in murder, concealing bodies and witness tampering.

Compaore has repeatedly denied entrenched suspicions among Burkinabe that he ordered Sankara’s killing, while Diendere has pleaded not guilty.

On January 24, mutinous soldiers overthrew Compaore’s elected successor, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, amid rising public anger at his failure to stem a bloody jihadist insurgency.

They set up a military junta that has dissolved the government and parliament and suspended the constitution.

It has vowed to re-establish “constitutional order” within a “reasonable time”. It has also pledged to guarantee the “independence” of the judicial system.

But Farama argued that the independence of the court was guaranteed by the constitution.

As a result, hearings in the court should be suspended since the constitution itself has been suspended, he maintained.

Source: AFP

A court in the Democratic Republic of Congo has sentenced 51 people to death over the killing of two United Nations experts.

Michael Sharp from the US and Swedish Zaida Catalan were killed in 2017 in the volatile Kasai region while on mission for the UN.

The military court on Saturday convicted the defendants, who were almost all militia members, on multiple counts including terrorism, murder, participation in an insurrectional movement and war crime through mutilation.

Of the 54 suspects on trial, 22 fugitives were tried in absentia. Two defendants, including a journalist and a police officer, were acquitted.

The two UN experts were on a UN mission to investigate a conflict between government forces and an armed group in the central Kasai region in March 2017 when they were stopped on a road and executed summarily by the armed men in a nearby field.

Catalan was then decapitated.

The bodies of the two UN experts were found on March 28, 2017, days after they went missing.

Congolese officials have blamed the incident on the Kamuina Nsapu militias, who were in conflict from 2016 to mid-2017 with the Congolese army forces in the region.

However, the DR Congo has been the scene of deadly violence for decades with armed militant groups oftentimes raiding villages and killing civilians.

DR Congo is a mineral-rich country that produces diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, cassiterite (tin ore) and coltan, which is used in mobile phones, personal computers, automotive electronics, and cameras, as well as oil, coffee and timber.

Despite the abundance of natural wealth, the Congolese people live in poverty.  In 2019, DR Congo ranked 178th in Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.

Sources