(Ouagadougou) Twenty people were killed overnight from Thursday to Friday in the attack on an artisanal gold mine in northern Burkina Faso, residents of the region told AFP on Saturday.
Posted at 12:57 p.m.
“Several dozen armed men on motorcycles attacked the gold panning site of Kougdiguin” near Barga, a locality in the rural commune of Bouroum, in the province of Namentenga, according to a resident.
“Unfortunately, we recorded about twenty dead and as many wounded”, who were evacuated to the Regional Hospital Center (CHR) of Kaya, capital of the Center-North region where the attack occurred, said he added.
Another resident confirmed this assessment, speaking of 22 dead and specifying that the perpetrators of the attack “are armed individuals who opened fire on the miners without distinction”. “There are women and children among the victims,” who were buried on Friday, he said.
A hospital source from the CHR joined by AFP said that it had received a dozen injured people, but that others had been admitted to several other health centers.
On March 12, eleven people were killed in the attack on an artisanal gold mine in Baliata, a locality located on the Dori axis, capital of the Sahel region, also in northern Burkina.
Two days earlier, a similar attack had targeted a wild gold mine in Tondobi, a locality in the municipality of Seytenga, near the Niger border, killing around ten people, according to security and local sources.
In total for three weeks, nearly 80 civilians and soldiers have been killed in attacks attributed to armed jihadist groups.
“The resurgence of terrorist attacks in recent times cannot and should not be read as a sign of inaction or ineffectiveness of what we are deploying on the ground,” said the President on Friday by acting from Burkina Faso, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, author of a coup on 24 January.
He announced the creation of local committees for dialogue with the armed groups, the purpose of which will be “to build bridges to allow those who, through naivety, greed, coercion or desire for revenge, have been dragged into a extremist spiral.
Like its neighbors Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of violence attributed to armed jihadist movements, affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, which have left more than 2,000 dead and 1.8 million displaced. .