AA / Dakar/ Alioune NDIAYE
The court of Ziguinchor in the south of the country pronounced, on Monday, life imprisonment once morest three of the fifteen accused of the killing of Boffa Bayotte in January 2018.
They are César Atoute Badiate, warlord of the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), convicted in absentia, Paul Capin Bassène and Oumar Ampoi Bodian.
The other defendants were acquitted by the court, two of them got away with suspended sentences for illegal possession of weapons.
On January 6, 2018, people who had gone to look for wood in the Boffa Bayotte forest south of Ziguinchor, not far from the border with Guinea Bissau, were attacked by armed assailants believed to belong to the MFDC.
“14 dead and 7 injured and three people who managed to escape unscathed”, had drawn up the national gendarmerie as an assessment of the “tense ambush”.
“People were rounded up, laid on the ground and savagely executed,” lamented the Gendarmerie.
A week following the tragedy, 22 people had been arrested. Following the hearings carried out by the gendarmerie, 16 people had been placed under a warrant of committal.
They were prosecuted for 14 charges including criminal association, assassination, participation in an insurrectionary movement and possession of firearms without authorization.
The southern region has been plagued since 1982 by an armed struggle by the MFDC, which is fighting for the independence of Casamance.
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