Speculation has been rife since Sunday, after several people were killed on Sunday January 3 in central Mali. The French army ensures, Tuesday, to have struck dozens of jihadists, while villagers and a local association spoke of civilians reached by an unidentified device during a wedding.
Messages have proliferated on social networks since Sunday on the events in the village of Bounti, in central Mali, one of the main hotbeds of violence in this region plunged into turmoil. Villagers interviewed by Agence France-Presse spoke of shooting from an unidentified helicopter, according to them, during a wedding. They mentioned up to twenty deaths.
Information […] do not correspond to the observations made.
The French staff refuted these claims. A patrol of fighter planes “neutralized” dozens of jihadists previously spotted after an intelligence operation lasting several days, he told Agence France-Presse. “The information about a marriage does not match the observations made,” he said.
The silence observed until then by the Malian civil and military authorities as well as by the French armed forces has left the field since Sunday to a flood of speculations very difficult to verify in a remote area whose access is made very complicated by the reputed presence. strong jihadists. Offensive air operations in Mali are essentially carried out by the Malian army and the French Barkhane force. Villagers contacted on the spot reported a helicopter strike in broad daylight causing panic in a crowd assembled, they said, for a wedding.
We were surprised by the intensity of the strike.
It “was the savage. I found myself in the bush, but I lost two brothers, ”said Ahmadou Ghana. In all, nineteen people were killed and several others seriously injured, he added. “We were surprised by the intensity of the strike. The helicopter was flying very low, to the point where we thought it was going to fly over the village, ”added Mady Dicko. As early as Sunday, Tabital Pulakuu, an association for the promotion of the culture of the Peuls, one of the Malian ethnic groups, reported an “air strike [ayant] cost the lives of at least 20 civilians ”during a marriage.
“There can be no doubts and ambiguity, there was no marriage. It is a strike carried out after a particularly formal and multi-party process on a fully identified terrorist armed group, after a cross-checking of information, attitudes, posture, on a characterized area ”, told Agence France-Presse an French military source close to the case. The region of Mopti, where Bounti is located, some 600 kilometers from the capital Bamako, is one of the main centers of violence that started from the North in 2012 and which has spread since 2015 to the south of the country, but also to Burkina Faso. Faso and neighboring Niger.
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