France on Tuesday said that it had killed dozens of militants in a weekend airstrike in central Mali, while several villagers and a local group said up to 20 wedding guests were killed by fire from a helicopter.
Social media has been buzzing since Sunday with rumors about events in Bounti, and villagers there said that a wedding party was attacked by an unidentified helicopter.
Separately, French military headquarters said that fighter jets had neutralized dozens of militants in central Mali after the group had been tracked for several days.
Photo: AFP
“The reports relating to a wedding do not match the observations that were made,” a French military spokesman said.
With no early statements from French or Malian officials, rumors filled the gap.
Confirmation of reports is difficult in a remote area where many militants are thought to operate. Offensive aerial operations in Mali are mainly conducted by the Malian military or by the French Barkhane force.
Villagers in Bounti said that a lone helicopter opened fire in broad daylight, sowing panic among a crowd gathered for a wedding.
“It was run for your lives,” said Ahmadou Ghana, who said 19 people died, including two of his brothers, while several others were seriously wounded.
“We were surprised by the intensity of the strike,” said another villager, Mady Dicko. “The helicopter was flying very low.”
Tabital Pulakuu, an association that promotes the culture of Mali’s Fulani ethnic group, on Sunday reported that an “airstrike that claimed the lives of at least 20 civilians.”
“There can’t be any doubts or ambiguity, there was no wedding,” a French military source familiar with the operation said. “This was a strike that was carried out after a particularly strict, multiparty process on a fully identified armed terrorist group, after collating information, intentions, posture, in a studied area.”
It remained unclear whether the French military and the Bounti villagers were referring to the same event.
A spokesperson for the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in Mali said that the force was “not involved” in the events in Bounti.
The village lies in the Mopti region, about 600km from the Malian capital, Bamako.
The region is the epicenter of a deadly Islamist offensive that began in northern Mali in 2012, and then advanced into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger, inflaming ethnic tensions.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in the conflict, and hundreds of thousands of people have had to flee their homes.
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