Survivors depict terror of Burkina Faso ambush
>>OUAGADOUGOU: A mine worker shot during an ambush on a mining convoy in Burkina Faso said on Friday he was one of only three survivors from a bus with up to 80 people aboard, suggesting the death toll may be much higher than officially reported.
Abel Kabore, 35, described the attackers, some speaking a foreign language and shouting “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is great” — raking three buses with bullets after a security vehicle escorting the convoy hit a landmine.
The first two buses were able to escape, he said.
“The three buses which were shot ... there were so many dead. It was over 100. We were on the ground. We saw everything,” he said quietly at a hospital in the capital Ouagadougou. Of the people on his bus, “only 3 survived.”
Another survivor, who worked for Australian mining services provider Perenti, said he was in the fifth bus, about 1km from the vehicle hit by the explosion.
The gunmen fired at for an hour and then came aboard to execute survivors.
“These were the last prayers we were praying,” he said, asking not to be identified for security reasons. “I pretended
I was dead — that was all I could do.”
When he was finally able to leave the bus, he had to climb over the dead bodies of his coworkers. “I saw one body facing up. I knew him. He looked untouched and I called out to him but he didn’t answer. Then I touched him and I knew he was dead.”
A security source who works in the sector and a worker at the mine previously said the convoy was likely carrying around 250 people in all, leaving dozens unaccounted for based on the authorities’ casualty list of 38 dead and 60 wounded.
Neither Canadian gold miner Semafo nor the Burkinabe authorities have confirmed how many people were in the convoy when it was ambushed on a road leading to the company’s Boungou mine in eastern Burkina Faso.
Neither responded to queries on Friday.
Perenti has said 19 of its workers were killed in the attack and 20 were sent to the hospital. The employees worked for its African Mining Services unit, which had been contracted by Semafo for work at its Boungou mine.
Panicked workers subsequently tried to flee the buses during the attack and then desperately scrambled back onboard away from gunmen in the bush, said another wounded survivor, Bakary Sanou.
“People were trying to go back into the buses. I tried to run away into the bush, and saw that they (the attackers) went back onto the buses, opened the doors and tried to kill everyone,” said Mr Sanou, an oversize bandage on his right foot.