Guinea, September 30: has banned “subversive” gatherings as it announced two days of national mourning after troops killed at least 157 people in a brutal crackdown on an opposition rally.
The country’s military ruler said he was sorry for the violence, but a human rights group alleged junta soldiers killed three more people outside the capital Conakry yesterday – a day after the crackdown – and kidnapped victims of the crackdown from hospitals.
“I declare a national mourning on Wednesday and Thursday,” junta leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara said on television.
“Any mass gatherings which are of a subversive nature are banned.”
Captain Camara urged Christian and Muslim priests, political and civic leaders and journalists to “abstain from acts that disrupt public order”. He also asked for national prayers to be held on Friday and Sunday in memory of the dead.
On France’s Europe 1 radio, Captain Camara sought to distance himself from the bloodshed, saying: “I was overtaken by events. I can’t control all the actions of this army. To say that I control this army would be demagogy”.
“I was bequeathed a half-century-old inheritance: an army in which a corporal can say ‘screw you’ to colonel or a general,” he said.
Victims kidnapped
Human rights activists reported fresh killings for a second day yesterday.
“Today we recorded three more deaths from army shootings, two in Wanidara and one in Cosa,” both neighbourhoods outside Conakry, said Thierno Maadjou Sow, an official with the Guinean Organisation for the Defence of Human Rights.
“The young people went outside and the soldiers shot at them.”
Mr Sow also alleged that soldiers removed wounded people from hospitals and took them to unknown locations.
“Soldiers went to take away the injured being treated at the Donka hospital (in the capital) to bring them to an unknown destination as well as women who had been raped and were being treated at the local health centre in Ratoma (outside the capital),” he said.
The United Nations, African Union and European Union, the United States and Canada all expressed alarm over the killings, which took place Monday at a stadium where tens of thousands of people attended a rally against Captain Camara.
The protesters were opposing any bid by the junta leader to run for president in an election due in January.
Captain Camara also faces strong international pressure to step down. He took over the west African nation after leading a bloodless coup within hours of the death of Guinea’s strongman leader Lansana Conte, who had ruled the west African country since 1984.
Yesterday he made his first appearance in public since the crackdown, visiting two hospitals in Conakry to meet with the wounded.
“It’s unfortunate, it’s dramatic,” he told French radio station RFI.
“Very frankly speaking, I’m very sorry, very sorry.”
He said “this is the first time such a thing has happened in Guinea,” and accused opposition leaders of fomenting unrest by “distributing money to the youth to incite them to revolt.”
—Agencies