Burkina Faso leader an<h advisers killed in coup

Press, 19 October 1987, Page 6

Burkina Faso leader an<h advisers killed in coup

NZPA-Reuter Ouagadougou Several of Burkina Faso’s new military leaders met foreign ambassadors on Saturday (New Zealand time) and told them they had not planned to kill President Thomas Sankara. It was the first confirmation that the 37-year-old paratroop captain had been shot dead. He died with 12 of his closest advisers when they resisted arrest in Friday’s bloody coup, diplomats quoted the new team as saying. The diplomats said the coup leader, Captain Blaise Compaore, did not attend the meeting, and his aides said he was too tired. Those present included Captain Henri Zongo and Major Jean-Baptiste Lingani, the former defence Minister. Along with President Sankara and Captain Compaore, his second-in-

command, they made up the four-man team which had governed the impoverished West African nation since a 1983 coup.

Before the meeting it had not been known whether they had sided with Captain Compaore in Friday’s coup in which, political sources said, as many as 100 people were killed when troops stormed the presidential palace and the State radio building. The diplomats said that Captain Compaore, Captain Zongo and Major Lingani appeared to be the leading members of a socalled Popular Front set up to replace the now disbanded National Revolutionary Council. Popular Front leaders told the diplomats they had acted on a tipoff that President Sankara intended to execute those planning to oppose him at a meeting of the council scheduled for

Friday. They also criticised at length his, “whimsical and immature political style” and said rectifications were badly needed to put an end to political infighting and economic chaos, the diplomats said. President Sankara and his aides, including the Interior Minister, Ernest Ouedraogo, and Presidential spokesman, Babou Paulin Bamouni, were buried in a cemetery near Ouagadougou but the Popular Front has yet to officially announce the deaths, . ' Thousands of people, in solemn and silent mood, have filed past the graves in the past 24 hours, eyewitnesses said. State radio maintained a barrage of anti-Sankara statements, with the latest criticising his “infantile” foreign policy which it said caused unnecessary tension with unnamed neighbouring States. Under the Left-wing

President Sankara, Burkina Faso fought a five-day war with neighbouring Mali and relations with pro-western Ivory Coast deteriorated. The people of Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest nations, were kept guessing as to which political ideology the new leadership would embrace. Captain Compaore, aged 35, a paratrooper, is described by some diplomats as a hardline Communist who is likely to push his country further Left and by others as a moderate with close ties to the Ivory Coast. The country was calm on Saturday and the dusty and bustling capital was back to its pre-coup animation following Friday’s national holiday. Land borders remained sealed, Ouagadougou airport was closed to international traffic and the country was under a night curfew.