According to information provided by the Nova agency, sixteen people will be tried in connection with the 6 massacre last January in the Casamance region, which caused the death of 14 people. This is reported by government sources cited in the local press. Yesterday, the Senegalese president Macky Sall asked the government to suspend, until new provisions, the authorizations for cutting the timber in the region and to speed up the investigation to bring the perpetrators of the massacre to justice.
Twenty-two people have been arrested so far as part of the investigation into the January 6 attack. The arrests, as announced in a press release from the gendarmerie released earlier this week, took place in the village of Toubacouta, in the Ziguinchor region. Among those arrested are four members of a local forest surveillance committee, already arrested last October and then released following a clash with some lumberjacks.
Last week the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (Mfdc), a secessionist rebel group active in southern Senegal, condemned the aggression. In a note released on 8 January and picked up by the international press, the group attributed the responsibility for the massacre to a feud linked to the illegal trafficking of teak wood. What happened, the statement reads, undermines efforts to restore peace in the region. The MFDC then called on the Dakar authorities to focus their investigations on local military and government officials "who are in charge of a vast network of logging and illegal teak sales". According to witnesses quoted by the local press, the attack was carried out by about twenty armed men. Senegalese Minister of the Interior Aly Ngouille Ndiaye promised a "hard and relentless" hunt for the perpetrators of the massacre.