Military consummate the coup in Burkina Faso, seize power and dissolve the Government and Parliament

The soldiers who launched a coup d’état in Burkina Faso on Sunday confirmed today on state television the seizure of power and announced the dissolution of the Government and Parliament.

In two statements read out by a spokesman, Capt. Sidsore Kader Ouedraogo, the coup plotters have announced that they have put an end to the power of the Burkinabe president, Roch Kabore, who ruled this West African country since 2015.

Kaboré had called on the mutinous soldiers to “lay down their arms”, hours after the local media pointed out that he had been detained by the Army, without his whereabouts being clear for now.

The president’s family has left the country in the face of mutiny at several bases around the capital, Ouagadougou, in the framework of which the general has been released Gilbert Diendéré, former chief of staff of the former president Blaise Compaore, convicted of an attempted coup in 2015 and also prosecuted in connection with the assassination of the former African president and revolutionary icon during the 1980s Thomas Sankara.

The Government decreed a curfew on Sunday, while the mutineers assured that they were not seeking to seize power, but rather demand more means and the immediate dismissal of the leadership of the National Intelligence Agency for their inability in the fight against jihadism that has plagued the country for years.

The mutiny took place about two weeks after the authorities announced the arrest of eight soldiers, including a commander, in connection with an alleged plot to “destabilize” the country’s institutions. They also suspended access to Facebook last week for unspecified security reasons.

The Burkinabe Prime Minister, Lassina Zerborecognized in early January that the country was going through an “extremely worrying” security situation and advocated making “national reconciliation” one of the lines of action to restore peace and security, after this instability has already left more than 1.5 million displaced since 2015.

The African country has generally experienced a significant increase in attacks since 2015. These, the work of both the affiliate of Al Qaeda and that of the Islamic State in the region, have also contributed to increasing inter-community violence and have made self-defense groups flourish.

The reporter from Pamplona David Beriain and the cameraman from Barakaldo Robert Friar They were murdered by an armed group in April 2021 in the African country.