Mali held a tribute under tight security for assassinated defence minister Sadio Camara on Thursday, following large-scale attacks at the weekend by jihadists and their Tuareg separatist allies.
Thousands of people, including the leader of the west African country’s military junta, attended the ceremony at the military engineering battalion’s grounds in the centre of the capital, Bamako.
Numerous armed soldiers were present, AFP journalists observed.
Checkpoints and barricades blocked roads leading to the parade ground, while security forces strictly controlled access.
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Camara was one of the junta’s top officials and was considered the architect of Mali’s rapprochement with Russia in recent years.
The 47-year-old minister died as a result of a car bomb on Saturday at his residence in Kati, a garrison town near Bamako that is home to several senior junta officials.
The government declared two days of national mourning following Camara’s death.
Kati was one of a number of strategic junta positions that were attacked on Saturday by militants from the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) and separatists from the Tuareg-dominated Azawad Liberation Front (FLA).
Relatives and friends of Camara attended Thursday’s ceremony, alongside officials from Mali and abroad, including the defence ministers of neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso.
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Mali’s ruling junta and its military counterparts in Niger and Burkina have severed ties with former colonial ruler France, moving closer politically and militarily to Moscow and banding together in the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).
Dressed in combat fatigues, junta leader Assimi Goita paid tribute to Camara by bowing before his coffin, which was draped in Mali’s green, yellow and red flag with his military cap on top.
The minister’s funeral service was due to take place later on Thursday.
The weekend attacks have generated a security crisis in the vast Sahel countryand resulted, according to an official toll, in the deaths of at least 23 civilians and soldiers.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
