Gunmen kill 10 and burn down village in restive central Mali

Unidentified gunmen killed 10 people and burned down a village in central Mali, local officials said Wednesday, the latest bloodshed in a region wracked by jihadist and inter-ethnic violence.

The attackers raided the village of Kourkanda near the West African country’s border with Burkina Faso on Monday, local chief Youssouf Togo said.

“Around dusk, they came in small groups on motorcycles—they were all armed,” he told AFP.

“They then started to circle the small village on their motorbikes. It was not until around 8 pm (2000 GMT), on March 9 that they started to attack.”

Yanah Dolo, an official from the nearest town of Bankass, said that 10 people were killed and the village torched.

“And nobody knows where the attackers came from,” said Dolo, whose representatives had inspected the scene of the attack.

Kourkanda is in the same region as the village of Ogossagou, which has seen two massacres in the space of a year.

Thirty-one Fulani civilians were butchered in Ogossagou on February 14 of this year, a tragedy made all the more brutal as it came after 160 members of the same ethnic community were slaughtered in the village in March 2019.

Central Mali has been riven by inter-ethnic violence since a jihadist revolt broke out in the north of the West African country in 2012.

The insurgency has claimed thousands of lives, displaced more than a million people and spread to neighbouring countries, while deadly tit-for-tat attacks have flared in Mali’s centre.