According to AFP, the French general staff provided a video which shows Russian mercenaries burying bodies near the Malian base of Gossi. According to the army, this mass grave must be used to accuse the French of having committed abuses.
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The French army claimed to have filmed Russian mercenaries burying bodies near the base of Gossi, in Mali, according to AFP on Friday April 22. According to the staff, this maneuver should then be used to accuse the French, in full withdrawal from the country, of having left a mass grave behind them.
The video seen by AFP was recorded from a drone and shows white soldiers (whom the army has already identified elsewhere) busying themselves around corpses, which they cover with sand. The French general staff affirms that these “exactions testify to the modes of action implemented by Wagner’s mercenaries, who have been observed in the Central African Republic since [son] deployment and which have been denounced by numerous international organizations and NGOs”.
Wagner is a private Russian paramilitary company, already involved in Crimea and Syria, and regularly accused of abuses. Some of its mercenaries have been redeployed to the Ukrainian front since the beginning of the war launched by Moscow against kyiv. Their arrival in Mali was one of the factors in the withdrawal of French forces in the country.
A photo of blurred corpses buried in the sand was posted by a Twitter account of a man named Dia Diarra, who claims to be “veteran” and “Malian patriot”with the comment: “This is what the French left behind when they left the base at #Gossi (…) We can’t keep quiet about this!”. The French general staff denounces a “discrediting maneuver (…) coordinate”, “representative of the multiple information attacks to which the French military have been subjected for many months”. She believes that this account “is most likely a fake account created by Wagner”the Russian private military company.
As part of its disengagement from Mali, announced in February, the French army officially handed over the keys to the Gossi base to the Malian armed forces on Tuesday 19 April. She had warned the same day that she expected informational attacks on the occasion of this retrocession.