Burkina Faso

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) — A series of explosions at a military barracks in Equatorial Guinea killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 600 others on Sunday, authorities said.

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema said the explosion at 4 p.m. local time was due to the “negligent handling of dynamite” in the military barracks located in the neighborhood of Mondong Nkuantoma in Bata.

“The impact of the explosion caused damage in almost all the houses and buildings in Bata,” the president said in a statement, which was in Spanish.

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - The ruling coalition of Burkina Faso President Roch Kabore, who was re-elected to a second term last week, has retained its majority in parliament, the electoral commission said on Sunday.

Kabore’s People’s Movement for Progress (MPP) and allied parties won about 90 of 127 seats in the Nov. 22 vote, official results showed.

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - Voters went to the polls in Burkina Faso on Sunday in a presidential election dominated by jihadist violence that has cost more than 2,000 lives this year and will prevent voting in hundreds of villages.

President Roch Kabore is seeking a second five-year term, campaigning on achievements such as free healthcare for children under the age of five and paving some of the red dirt roads that snake across the arid West African country.

GAMPELA, Burkina Faso (AP) — The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator.

From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.

OUAGADOUGOU, Sept 27 (NNN-XINHUA) – Development assistance to Burkina Faso, amounted to 907 billion CFA francs (almost 1.55 billion U.S. dollars) over 2019, the country’s Ministry of Economy and Finance said, in a 2019 review issued last night.

The number represents a four-percent increase from the previous year, according to the review.

The top ten partners were the World Bank Group, the United Nations, the Global Fund, the European Union, the Islamic Development Bank, Germany, the United States, France, Sweden and the African Development Bank.

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - Burkina Faso’s government on Friday questioned the conclusions of a Human Rights Watch report which said that the West African country’s armed forces may have carried out mass executions.

Wednesday’s HRW report said government forces were likely to have been behind killings between November 2019 and June 2020 around Djibo, a town in the north of Burkina Faso, where at least 180 bodies were found in common graves.

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - At least 15 people were killed following an attack on a convoy transporting traders in a town in northern Burkina Faso on Friday, the government said on Saturday.

The attack, carried out by an unidentified group of assailants, left several others wounded. Many more were still unaccounted for, the government said in a statement.

Burkina Faso has been battling armed combatants with links to al Qaeda and the Islamic State since 2017.

OUAGADOUGOU,  May 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Burkina Faso prosecutor has launched an investigation after 12 people died during the same night in detention cells, hours after they were arrested for suspected terrorism-related offences in a town in the east of the country.

The case comes weeks after advocacy group Human Rights Watch said it believed Burkina Faso security forces summarily executed 31 unarmed detainees during operations against Islamist militants.

OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - Nowadays Rahinatou Diasso scolds her children when they wash with too much water. It has become a precious resource since Burkina Faso’s coronavirus curfew stopped those in poor areas from accessing communal fountains that only flow at night in the dry season.

As a result, families like Diasso’s ration water and jostle in line to fill empty jerry-cans from privately-owned water towers during the day even as the Burkinabe authorities urge them to take extra precautions and avoid crowds to curb the fastest rate of coronavirus infection in West Africa.

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) — Gunmen killed 24 civilians, including a church pastor, and kidnapped three others on Sunday in Burkina Faso, an official said. It was the latest attack against a religious leader in the increasingly unstable West African nation.

The mayor of Boundore commune, Sihanri Osangola Brigadie, said the attack occurred in the town of Pansi in Yagha province. The roughly 20 attackers separated men from women close to a Protestant church. At least 18 other people were injured.