Violence in Senegal?s Casamance: Gunmen execute 13 youths
 

ZIGUINCHOR: Gunmen ordered youths to lie on the ground deep in the forest of Casamance before summarily executing 13 of them, a survivor said Sunday following the first upsurge in violence in the isolated Senegalese region in years. Senegal´s President Macky Sall, condemning an ?armed attack of rare barbarity?, summoned his national security council and ordered a ministerial delegation to the scene, a government statement said hours after Saturday´s attack. Survivor Amadou Diallo said the youths were rounded up while collecting wood in the Bayotte forest, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Ziguinchor, the regional capital. Two armed men stopped Diallo early in the morning, he told local radio.
?They made me give them my phone and join others who were arrested before me... They got us to take off our shoes and lie down, then fired on us before withdrawing. I wasn´t hit.? A source in Ziguinchor said 13 youths were killed, while army spokesman Abdou Ndiaye told AFP seven others were injured. The Senegalese Press Agency said the assailants would have passed a buffer zone between the Senegalese army and separatist rebels of the Movement for Democratic Forces in Casamance (MFDC).Abdoulaye Balde, a former armed forces minister and deputy mayor of Ziguinchor, said those responsible were likely outside the peace process in a region where rebels began fighting in December 1982 ? though they have long ceased attacks on soldiers. ?We have not been able to identify? the groups responsible, Balde told AFP.

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