Burkina Faso has begun three days of national mourning and the President said security would be stepped up in the capital and the country’s borders after Al Qaeda militants killed at least 28 people in an attack on a hotel and cafe popular with foreigners.
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RCMP officers have been dispatched to Burkina Faso to help local authorities after more than two dozen people – including six Canadians – were killed in a terrorist attack.
The team returned to Burkina Faso on Saturday where they had since been waiting to travel back to the United States.
AQIM claimed a similar attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali’s capital Bamako that killed 20 people in November. Seven bodies are yet to be identified, and the list is subject to change.
“For the first time in its history, our country has fallen victim to a series of barbaric terrorist attacks”, he said in a live address to the nation.
Her latest show at Paris’ European Photography House featured portraits of Moroccan men and women in traditional clothes, the result of what she said was “a road trip across rural Morocco” using a mobile studio to preserve “a visual archive of Morocco’s traditions and aesthetic universe”.
Chamberland’s sister, Marie-Claude Blais, wrote on Facebook: “I still can’t understand how people who had such a love of life, who were always ready to help, always smiling and loved by so many people, can be taken away in such a horrendous way”. “And that’s backbreaking work”.
The ambassador also revealed that it was the French troops that killed the assailants. French experts have been carrying out forensic investigations at the sites.
Around 1 a.m., about 50 security forces including the French, Burkinabe and an American tried to enter the hotel but were fired upon and one French special forces member took a bullet in the leg.
Gunmen from the Islamist militant group stormed the Cappuccino restaurant and the Splendid Hotel on Friday night, singling out white people for slaughter.
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Mr Compaore and Burkina Faso’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Alpha Barry, have met diplomats, trying to reassure them that the west African country will remain a safe place. The congregation, founded in 1892 in St-Damien-de-Buckland, has had a mission in Burkina Faso since 1955. The couple, reported to be in their 80s, were kidnapped in the northern town of Djibo where they had run a medical centre for 40 years.
