Police officers returning to their duty at the border post in Sona were hit by an explosive device and then came under heavy fire from unknown assailants, Mali’s police said.
Five police officers were killed in an attack in southwestern Mali and three others are missing, police said, while the military said another attack it attributed to jihadists in the north.
The first attack took place yesterday morning in Sona, a village in Koutiala district, near the border with Burkina Faso.
Police officers returning to their duty at the border post in Sona were hit by an explosive device and then came under heavy fire from unknown assailants, Mali’s police said.
“The casualty count is five police officers dead, one injured and three missing,” for whom an investigation is ongoing, according to a police press release.
The number of five dead was confirmed to AFP by police officers and a hospital official.
At the same time, the Mali army announced yesterday through social networking sites that it repelled, in the Gao region (north-east), an attack launched yesterday afternoon by jihadists of the Islamic State in the Sahara (IS), without giving further details.
Mali, a landlocked country in the heart of the Sahel, has been the scene of two military coups in August 2020 and May 2021. The political crisis is compounded by an increasingly serious security crisis after separatist uprisings erupted in 2012 and bloody jihadist attacks in the north. .
RES-EMP
Read the News today and get the latest news. Follow Skai.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news.
