The Malian junta rejected this Friday the “biased” accusations according to her of massacres and human rights violations presented by the UN mission in the country against the armed forces.
“The complaints are very often tendentious, without control, related according to non-contradictory testimonies, not based on any tangible evidence and many times made under the threat of terrorist groups,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a document distributed on social networks. following the publication on Wednesday of a quarterly note from the UN mission in Mali (Minusma) on human rights.
tortured prisoners
This note attributes the death of at least 50 civilians to Malian soldiers accompanied by “foreign soldiers” during an operation carried out on April 19 in Hombori (center) after the explosion of an improvised device that was passing by an army convoy. Different sources at the time told AFP that one man killed in the blast was a Russian deployed in an operation with Malian soldiers.
Among the men taken prisoner, two died under torture and, on April 24, a soldier “summarily killed” another 20 prisoners in the Malian army camp in Hombori, says Minusma. In total, the operations of the Malian forces caused the death of 96 civilians in the second quarter, out of a total of 317, including 200 attributable to jihadist groups, says Minusma.
These incriminations “are intended to tarnish the image of the Malian forces and discredit them before the populations and international opinion,” the Malian ministry estimated in what it presents as its response delivered to MINUSMA before the publication of its report. for the last.
Source: BFM TV
