'So many dead': Survivors describe terrifying Burkina Faso ambush

[TexasTowelie]

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - A mine worker shot during an ambush on a mining convoy in Burkina Faso said on Friday he was one of only three survivors from a bus with up to 80 people aboard, suggesting the death toll may be much higher than officially reported.

Abel Kabore, 35, described the attackers, some speaking a foreign language and shouting “Allahu Akbar” - Arabic for “God is great” - raking three buses with bullets after a security vehicle escorting the convoy hit a landmine.

The first two buses were able to escape, he said.

“The three buses which were shot ... there were so many dead. It was over 100. We were on the ground. We saw everything,” he said quietly at a hospital in the capital Ouagadougou. Of the people on his bus, “only 3 of us survived.”

Another survivor, who worked for Australian mining services provider Perenti, said he was in the fifth bus, about a km (half a mile) from the vehicle hit by the explosion.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-semafo-attack/anxious-families-look-for-missing-relatives-after-deadly-burkina-faso-mine-ambush-idUSKBN1XI1C2

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1. "It was still unclear who carried out Wednesday's ambush ..."

A homegrown, three-year-old insurgency has spread over parts of Burkina Faso, amplified by a spillover of Islamist militant violence and criminality from its chaotic northern neighbor Mali.

In 2016, an Islamist attack on a hotel and restaurant in the capital killed 30 people. A similar assault the next year killed 19. In 2018, militants hit the French Embassy and the army headquarters in Ouagadougou, killing 16.