Guinea opposition decries 90 protest deaths

CONAKRY - Over 90 people have been killed in a crackdown on protests against Guinea's President Alpha Conde's bid to seek a contro-versial third term in elections next week, a lead-ing opposition group said on Monday.

The 82-year-old is bidding for re-election on October 18, after pushing through a new consti- tution in March that critics say was designed to sidestep a two- term limit.

Opposition to a third Conde term brought tens of thousands of Guineans to the streets from mid- October 2019.

The protests often turned violent, however, and dozens were killed. The constitutional referen-dum in March was also marred by violence.

On Monday, the anti-Conde coalition FNDC published a tally of 92 protesters killed since mid- October.

Some 45 of those protesters were shot dead, the National Front for the Defence of the Constitu-tion (FNDC) said, and eight remain unidenti-fied.

Guinea's Security Minister Albert Damantang Camara dismissed the FNDC tally, however, saying that he refused to submit to a politically motivated "macabre accounting."

"There have been violent deaths, which we re-gret, and we are working to ensure that this does not happen again, but it would be very surprising if there were 92 of them," he said.

The minister admitted that political clashes may be responsible for 42 deaths, but said there was not enough evidence to attribute them to securi-ty forces.

Rights groups accuse Conde - who is a former opposition figure himself - of drifting into au- thoritarianism.

Amnesty International, in a report published on October 1, blamed Guinean security forces for killing at least 50 protesters and urged the gov-ernment to hold the perpetrators accountable. – AFP.