“Several dozen armed men on motorcycles attacked the gold panning site of Kougdiguin“near Barga. This small town in the rural commune of Bouroum, in the province of Namentenga, according to a resident.
He explains : “unfortunately, we recorded regarding twenty dead and as many woundedAccording to his information, the victims were evacuated to the Regional Hospital Center (CHR) in Kaya, capital of the Center-North region where the attack occurred.
Suspected armed individuals
Another resident confirmed this assessment, speaking of 22 dead and specifying that the perpetrators of the attack “are armed individuals“. The witness claims that they “opened fire on the miners without distinction“. “Women and children are recorded among the victims” he said. The deceased were able to be buried during the day on Friday.
A hospital source from the CHR joined by AFP indicated that he had received a dozen wounded. Others were admitted to several other health centers.
Very active jihadist groups in the region
On March 12, eleven people were killed in the attack on an artisanal gold mine in Baliata, a locality located on the Dori axis, capital of the Sahel region, also in northern Burkina.
Two days earlier, a similar attack had targeted a wild gold mine in Tondobi, a locality in the municipality of Seytenga, near the Niger border, killing around ten people, according to security and local sources.
In total for three weeks, nearly 80 civilians and soldiers have been killed in attacks attributed to armed jihadist groups.
Government ready to dialogue with armed groups
“The resurgence of terrorist attacks in recent times cannot and should not be read as a sign of inaction or the ineffectiveness of what we are deploying on the ground.“, said Friday the interim president of Burkina Faso, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, author of a coup on January 24.
He announced the creation of local committees for dialogue with armed groups which will aim “to develop bridges to allow those who, through naivety, greed, constraint or desire for revenge, have been drawn into an extremist spiral“.
Like its neighbors Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of violence attributed to armed jihadist movements, affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, which have left more than 2,000 dead and 1.8 million displaced. .
