Burkina Faso’s ousted President, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, “is physically well” and is being held by the army in a villa, a source in his party said on Wednesday.
The source who had earlier narrated the circumstances under which the president was forced to leave power could however not say anything about his state of mind but says “he has a doctor at his disposal,” the source from the People’s Movement for Progress told AFP.
“It was he who wrote the letter of resignation published by national television, but I can not say under what conditions he wrote,” added the same source.
She then recounted the film of events before the writing of this letter.
“He was not arrested in the first hours” of the mutinous soldiers’ action: “his private residence was cordoned off by the mutineers, and it was necessary for his close guard to use strategy by exfiltrating him on board an unmarked vehicle to put him in a safe place,” said this source.
The source added, “He was not in the convoy which was riddled with bullets” and of which three vehicles had been seen Monday morning by an AFP journalist and which, according to the source of the former ruling party, “were those of his guards who deceived the vigilance of the mutineers”.
“It was later and under pressure from the mutineers, that his guards – notably gendarmes – had to leave him in their hands (of the coup plotters), and rally to them in the process,” she said.
“The gendarmerie could only rally because the entire army was willing to remove the president from office,” she said.
Shortly before the announcement of the putsch and while Kaboré’s fate was unclear Monday after two days of mutiny in the barracks, the MPP denounced in a statement “an aborted assassination attempt” on the president.
Roch Marc Christian Kaboré was overthrown by the military led by a lieutenant colonel, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, president of a junta called the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR) that has taken over the country plagued by jihadist violence.
AFP