Mystery beheadings strike terror

Bewildered by the killings

FANA, Mali (AFP) — Boubou Sangare, his face blank, points at a patch of ground beneath the entrance to an adobe house.

It was here that he discovered his brother Bakary’s severed head, on the morning of 10 June, lying next to his body.

The 40-year-old former soldier had become the latest victim in a spate of unsolved grisly murders that have plagued the remote town of Fana, in southern Mali, since 2018.

Police arrived on the scene 40 minutes after Boubou Sangare found his brother’s mutilated remains and cordoned off the area.

Officers found an iron bar at the scene, and drops of blood leading behind the house and to motorcycle tyre tracks in the dirt.

But police investigators remain bewildered by the killings.

The murder spree in Fana, a town of some 36,000 people, is all the more unusual for occurring in an area far from the violent hotspots in the vast West African country.

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