Abidjan – Three appeals’ court magistrates in Burkina Faso and two senior journalists from leading private daily newspapers have been kidnapped or reported missing, a media organisation, a friend and a legal source said Monday.
Since taking power in a September 2022 coup, the west African country’s junta has been accused of repressing critical voices, including by sending people to the front line to fight jihadist violence.
Authorities have in recent months released about 10 people who had been kidnapped or arrested and forcibly mobilised.
Earlier Monday, Ousseni Ilboudo, editorial director of L’Observateur Paalga, was arrested by individuals who presented themselves as intelligence agency members, while he was preparing to hold the daily editorial conference, the newspaper said on Facebook.
He was put into a van “to a destination unknown to us”, it said.
Another journalist, Michel Nana, deputy chief editor of the Le Pays newspaper, was abducted earlier in the day by men in civilian clothing, one of his friends told AFP.
Two magistrates from the Ouagadougou court of appeal were kidnapped on Friday and Sunday, and another has been missing since Saturday, a legal source told AFP.
Dozens of military officers, including former gendarmerie chief of staff Evrard Somda, have also been arrested over the last year, accused of “conspiracy” or “attempting to destabilise republican institutions”.
Junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traore seized power promising to put an end to the spiral of violence that has plagued Burkina Faso for more than a decade.
But jihadists, who have pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group, have continued to commit violence across swathes of the desert nation.
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Source: AFP
