Four people were killed in clashes between security forces and supporters of a Cameroonian opposition leader who claims to have won the presidential election, authorities said ahead of the announcement of official results yesterday.
Issa Tchiroma, who challenged Cameroonian President Paul Biya’s 43-year grip on power in the Oct. 12 ballot, had called on his supporters to march peacefully on the eve of the announcement, despite a ban on public gatherings.
Tchiroma said that he won 54.8 percent of the vote, but most analysts expect the 92-year-old Biya to win an eighth term in a system his critics say has been increasingly rigged.
Photo: Reuters
In Cameroon’s largest city, Douala, the regional governor said demonstrators “attacked” a gendarmerie brigade and police stations in two districts on Sunday.
“Four people unfortunately lost their lives,” Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua said, adding that several members of the security forces were also injured.
Protesters at the scene showed journalists bullet casings they said they collected after security forces fired shots near the gendarmerie.
The shooting with “live ammunition” began after a volley of tear gas, a demonstrator said on condition of anonymity.
“They fired, three people, three bodies fell in front of us,” he said.
Earlier on Sunday, police had fired teargas to disperse hundreds of people in Tchiroma’s northern stronghold of Garoua, where activists carried Cameroonian flags and banners reading: “Tchiroma 2025” and chanted “Goodbye Paul Biya, Tchiroma is coming.”
For several days, dozens of supporters have gathered around the home of the opposition leader, who on Sunday claimed in a video that military personnel had tried to take him away.
In the capital, Yaounde, the call to protest did not seem to have been followed amid a heavy police presence, but in Douala, prior to the reported clashes, a journalist observed several dozen people gathered near the airport, defying the ban on demonstrations ordered by the department’s prefect.
On Friday last week, two opposition figures from a coalition that had endorsed Tchiroma as a candidate were arrested in their homes in Douala, the coalition said.
They are Djeukam Tchameni, president of the Movement for Democracy and Interdependence in Cameroon, and Anicet Ekane, president of the African Movement for the New Independence of Cameroon.
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