The first of the defendants to speak before the military court in Ouagadougou, which judges the presumed murderers of the “father of the Burkinabe revolution” Thomas Sankara in 1987, a soldier acknowledged the facts of the “attack on the State security” and recounted the details of the assassination on Tuesday.
This soldier, Yamba Élisée Ilboudo, said that on October 15, 1987, the day of the coup d’état during which Thomas Sankara and 12 of his companions were killed, he was “at the home of Blaise Compaoré”, brought to power by the putsch.
“It was at Mr. Compaoré’s house that Hyacinthe Kafando, who commanded us as head of security, asked me to start a vehicle to go to the Entente Council,” the headquarters of the National Council of the Revolution where the killing took place,” he said.
Having arrived on the scene, Kafando and “Maïga, who was driving Blaise Compaoré’s vehicle, went down and fired in disorder,” said the 62-year-old first-class soldier at the bar, without mentioning his first name.
He who claims to have remained in his vehicle, without firing, then tells the details of the assassination. After the first shots, he saw Thomas Sankara “walk out of the meeting room with his hands up, asking what is going on.
Hyacinthe Kafando and Maïga ran into him. I don’t know who shot President Sankara first. He fell on his knees before tipping to the left,” he said.
He acknowledged the facts of “complicity in an attack on state security”, but denied the premeditation, assuring that he had not participated in a preparatory meeting for these events. “I didn’t know we were going to do a coup, let alone take someone’s life,” he said.
“They coldly shot President Sankara who came out with his hands in the air and without arms,” said Ferdinand Nzapa, the Sankara family’s lawyer, saying he was the “only accused to be very cooperative.”
Before the start of the interrogation, the court listened to audio and video files dating from 1987 in which Blaise Compaoré justifies the events of that October 15, resulting according to him from “fundamental differences arising over the past year on operational issues of the revolutionary process”.
In one of the files, Compaoré, who had participated in the 1983 coup d’état that brought to power Thomas Sankara of whom he was a close friend, presents him as a “traitor to the revolution who led an autocratic” and “personal” power. “The other comrades had decided to dismiss him” or to force him to “resign”, he adds, justifying the “need for a correction”.
Mousbila Sankara, Ambassador at the time of the assassination of Thomas Sankara and his companions, said he had been tortured and imprisoned for 4 years, for having dared to say no to what was happening.
“After the assassination of Thomas Sankara and his companions in 1987, notwithstanding the loss of our revolution, I was personally arrested, tortured and imprisoned for four years for saying no.
I was tortured by Gilbert Diendéré at the Entente Council. I was also tortured in the gendarmerie under Captain Jean-Pierre Palm for two years,” he says.
He continues: “They are all cited in this trial. I do not know in what capacity everyone was involved, but as far as I am concerned, they were responsible for the barracks in which I was tortured”.
Blaise Compaoré, Sankara’s right-hand man, has always denied ordering the assassination.
Twelve of the 14 defendants were present, including General Gilbert Diendéré, 61, one of the main army leaders during the 1987 coup.
But Blaise Compaoré, who lives in Côte d’Ivoire, is absent, as is former chief warrant officer Hyacinthe Kafando, on the run. Blaise Compaoré, expelled from power in 2014 by the streets, is accused of “complicity in assassinations”, “concealment of corpses” and “attack on state security”.
On Tuesday, the court agreed to a request by defence lawyers for the release of the defendants who had been detained two days before the opening of the trial.
Eleven of them will be granted provisional release. Only General Diendéré is kept in detention because he is already serving a 20-year prison sentence for an attempted coup in 2015.
Source : CoupFranc.com
