Security forces opened fire on a crowd demanding that suspects in the abduction of an albino child be handed over to them.
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The balance sheet is getting heavier. The gendarmes of Madagascar confirmed, Tuesday August 30, to have killed 19 people by shooting on an angry crowd which tried Monday to enter their barracks in the south-west of the island, following a case of albino child abduction. “Twenty-one injured are still being treated” at the hospital in Ikongo, the locality where the incident took place, they said. The first toll reported 11 dead.
In the morning, shots rang out in Ikongo, a locality immersed in the green mountains of the big island in the Indian Ocean. Since last week, the town has been in shock: a child, albino, has disappeared and the authorities suspect a kidnapping. In this southern African country, people with albinism are regularly the target of violence, often because of certain beliefs.
More than a dozen kidnappings, attacks and murders have been reported over the past two years in Madagascar, according to the United Nations. Four suspects were arrested by the gendarmes after the disappearance of the child and placed in detention in the barracks of Ikongo. But the locals decided to take the law into their own hands.
They went to the gendarmerie barracks on Monday and asked that the four suspects be handed over to them, Jean Brunelle Razafintsiandraofa, deputy for the district, told AFP. When the crowd tried to breach the security perimeter, things got out of hand. The gendarmes used tear gas and fired warning shots. “But, as a last resort, the gendarmes had no choice but to resort to self-defense”explained the commander of the gendarmerie.