Sierra Leone said that 13 of its soldiers had been killed in clashes with gunmen following attacks Sunday on an army base in the capital, Freetown.
Government forces arrested four of the assailants, who also killed one police officer over the weekend, army spokesman Issa Bangura said by telephone. Three assailants were killed and dozens are still on the run.
“We continue to pursue them just outside the capital,” Bangura said. The invasion of two prisons by the gunmen also led to the escape of 1,119 inmates, of which 53 have since been recaptured, he said.
The unrest comes amid increasing tension in the West African nation after President Julius Maada Bio’s disputed reelection in June.
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Some of the group’s leaders fled to the hills on the outskirts of Freetown, where authorities are working to capture them, Information Minister Chernor Bah said on Monday.
“They have been surrounded and we’re very confident that they will be apprehended the next day or so,” he said. “We’re reviewing everything that happened to understand why this breach happened. The president has instructed that additional security measures are put in place.”
The developments in Sierra Leone come after military takeovers in Gabon and Niger this year, and coups in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Chad over the past three years. The July putsch in Niger, which the Economic Community of West African States is currently negotiating to overturn, created a belt of military-run African nations that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
Sierra Leone’s military headquarters lies strategically near the presidential palace and some of the attackers have been identified as former and currency members of the security forces, according to Bah. A night curfew will remain in place while the authorities work to determine whether the weekend’s events amount to an attempted putsch, he said.
“We want to make sure that the threshold for an attempted coup is met before signifying it as such,” he said. “Once we have it, we will have to try the people who’ve been arrested.”
The aggression was a plot by “certain individuals” to acquire arms and disturb the peace and constitutional order in the country, the regional bloc known by its acronym Ecowas said in a statement. “Ecowas condemns this act and calls for the arrest and prosecution of all participants in this illegal act.”
Flights Disrupted
The clashes disrupted flights on Sunday, the civil aviation agency said in a statement. It told airlines to reschedule departing flights for after the curfew is lifted.
Bio, 59, won a second mandate to lead Sierra Leone earlier this year. The results were rejected by the opposition and questioned by international observers including the US, which raised concerns about “irregularities” in the election results.
A retired military officer, Bio briefly led a military junta during an 11-year civil war that ended in 2002. The June election was the fifth since the end of the war, which claimed 50,000 lives and devastated the economy.
--With assistance from Michael Ovaska.
(Recasts with government forces death toll from first paragraph.)