Ivory Coast soldiers armed with assault rifles patrolled the deserted beaches of a resort town on Monday, a day after gunmen from al Qaeda’s North African branch killed 18 people, the third major Al Qaeda attack in West Africa in four months.
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“These terrorist attacks can happen anywhere, at any time”, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara said on Sunday after visiting the scene of the shooting.
The hotels in Grand-Bassam are frequented by both locals and foreign tourists, NPR’s Ofeibea Quist-Arcton says.
Security forces moved to evacuate the area surrounding the beach. Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb later claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a Jihad monitoring website cited by the Associated Press. The Tunisian attack was claimed by the group that calls itself “Islamic State” (IS), but the Tunisian government said it believed that AQIM was behind it.
Home to some 80,000 people, Grand-Bassam holds Unesco World Heritage status thanks to its elegant colonial-era facades.
AQIM claimed deadly attacks on luxury hotels in Mali in November and Burkina Faso in January.
At least one French person died in the attack, a French Foreign Ministry spokesperson told Reuters. “We did whatever we could”, he said. The area of the attack was cordoned off, for the removal of any unexploded munitions and the government said that security forces had killed three of the six assailants. A witness named Marcel Guy said he saw a group of at least four men armed with Kalashnikovs on the beach near the L’Etoile du Sud hotel.
Assistant Secretary of Commerce Marcus Jadotte was leading a group of Americans in Grand-Bassam, including college recruiters from the University of Florida.
Dozens of people were killed, including six gunmen, in the attack.
Ouattara was re-elected for a second presidential term late a year ago, hoping to turn the page on the violence and revive Ivory Coast’s conflict-scarred economy. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it has opened an investigation into the attack, calling it murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise. “We did whatever we could”, he said, adding that security forces had responded within 30 minutes and that the assailants had been killed within two hours. French officials have said that the militants are likely to change their methods and that West African security forces should increasingly prepare for counter-terrorism operations.
Ivory Coast’s interior minister listed the victims’ nationalities as Ivorian, Burkinabe, Malian, Cameroonian, French and German, without offering more details.
France and the US have recently warned of possible terror attacks targeting Western interests in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal.
“It’s a grave event, but we must face it”, he said.
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Ivory Coast is an important regional partner to the United States, the statement said.
