adminBANGUI. — Around 80 bodies were found lying in a mosque and its surrounding streets in the Central African capital Bangui yesterday after overnight violence, AFP reporters saw.
At the PK 5 mosque, 54 bodies with what appeared to be knife and gun-shot wounds, were laid out in the prayer hall and the courtyard. In the streets nearby, journalists counted 25 abandoned corpses.
“The bodies were brought here this morning by people from the surrounding area,” a mosque official who requested anonymity told AFP. The mosque was full of distraught men and women who had come to look for missing loved ones.
In a sign of continuing tensions in the city, men ringed the mosque carrying machetes. Streets nearby were deserted apart from the bodies lying in them.
The group Doctors Without Borders gave a toll in one of Bangui’s hospitals of 10 dead and 65 hurt, all from gunshots or blade wounds. It was presumed that other city hospitals also had corpses and wounded from the new wave of violence. Thursday began with the sound of gunfire before dawn in a northern neighbourhood of the city.
The violence soon spread to other areas, with automatic gunfire and the boom of heavy weapons heard, before shooting subsiding gradually as the day wore on to leave just sporadic shots in some districts. Some 250 French soldiers deployed in the streets a few hours before the UN Security Council approved a big Franco-African military intervention in the country to halt the unrest. AFP.
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