Alleged attackers of TV station were killed elsewhere - diplomat

The government of Cote d'Ivoire has said that 18 unidentified assailants were shot dead when they tried to attack the television station and a transmitter in Abidjan on Thursday night, but a diplomatic source said on Sunday that all appeared to have been killed elsewhere and their corpses had then been taken to the scenes of the alleged shoot-outs. "What I heard was the those people were not shot at either the television station or Abobo," the diplomat, who has good military contacts, told IRIN. "They were killed elsewhere and their bodies were taken there." "Most of their injuries were not consistent with gunshot wounds. The whole thing was staged," he added, noting that there were no weapons on the corpses. The diplomat's comments reinforced growing speculation that the incident was staged by aides of President Laurent Gbagbo at a sensitive moment in negotiations to try and bring rebel forces occupying the north of Cote d'Ivoire back into the country's stalled peace process. Such speculation has arisen from a series of puzzling contradictions in the government's own version of events. According to Bertin Kadet, a former defence minister who now serves as Gbagbo's defence adviser, the attackers arrived at the television station travelling aboard mini-buses and a four-wheel drive vehicle and opened fire on paramilitary gendarmes manning a checkpoint nearby. Kadet said that miraculously none of the gendarmes were killed or injured, but they managed to return fire, killing 12 of the attackers. However, one gendarme on duty at the time told state television that the attackers were unarmed and the guards had only opened fire after the attackers rushed them and tried to try and seize their guns. According to government officials, a further six attackers died in separate shoot-outs with the security forces in the working class suburb of Abobo, where they were apparently aiming to seize control of a television transmitter mast. Two newspapers, Le Jour, and Patriote, both reported in their Saturday editions that those killed did not die in combat. Le Jour said those allegedly shot at the television station in the posh diplomatic district of Cocody were actually killed nearby in cold blood and their bodies were subsequently taken to the television station. Patriote, an opposition newspaper which sympathises with the rebel cause, meanwhile quoted a resident who lives near the television station as saying the victims were stripped naked and made to lie on the ground before being shot. Gendarmes subsequently drove round nearby streets firing in the air, he was quoted as saying. There are plenty of other unresolved contradictions about the affair. None of those killed have so far been publicly identified. Neither have any details emerged about the identity of several of their accomplices, who according to Gbagbo, were captured and were undergoing interrogation. Furthermore, official accounts of the incidents which rent the midnight air with gunfire suggested that the alleged attackers could either have been members of a hardline pro-Gbagbo youth militia group opposed to any peace deal with the rebels or, at the other extreme, dissident Muslim rebel fighters from northern Cote d'Ivoire who were equally determined to wreck peace efforts. According to Jean Paul Dahily, the secretary general of the state television station RTI, the attackers were wearing black T-shirts bearing the words "Ninja Brigade," the name of one of the militia-style pro-Gbagbo youth groups known generically as "Young Patriots." However reporters who visited the alleged scene of the shoot-out were shown magic amulets of the type generally made by Muslim holy men known as marabouts. These are frequently used by people from the rebel-held north of the country. The reporters were told that those killed were wearing these magic charms, which are associated more with rebel fighters from the north than the predominantly christian Young Patriots from the south. Several newspapers reported that all of charms looked new and none were stained by blood, suggesting implicitly that they might have been planted at the scene. Even more surprisingly, the alleged attack on the television station appears to have left the president and his top aides completely unconcerned. Gbagbo dismissed those who died as madmen bent on a suicide attack and questioned whether they had taken drugs. He described the alleged assaults as "the death throes of people who have lost everything, people who are now throwing themselves upon death." But speaking to visitors at the presidential place on Friday, Gbagbo reiterated his promise made on 4 December, that he would go to the rebel stronghold of Bouake in central Cote d'Ivoire before Christmas, to declare the 15-month civil war over as demobilisation and disarmament of rebel fighters finally got under way. Gbagbo announced his planned visit to Bouake after signing an agreement with the rebels' military commander, Colonel Soumaila Bakayoko, that the process of disarmament should begin on 15 December. Even General Mathias Doue, the military chief of staff who was publicly humiliated by Gbagbo last month when the president said he sympathised with a group of soldiers who demanded the sacking of the government's top military commanders, appeared grimly satisfied with the bloody outcome of Thursday night. "We ask the forces of defence and security to be vigilant and for now we congratulate ourselves on the work which has just been accomplished," Doue said. The soldiers who demanded the sacking of Doue and two other top military commanders, did so by marching into the RTI television studios in Abidjan on the night on 29 November and interrupting programmes to demand that that the top brass be dismissed so that war against the rebels could resume. No-one prevented them from walking in and diplomats said they assumed those men were operating with official sanction from the president. But like the bodies which appeared outside the television studios and in the working class suburb of Abobo on Friday morning, they were never officially identified. Le Jour reported on Saturday: "It has emerged from our investigations that the persons killed were not former rebels, contrary to the theories put forward by the authorities. They were loyalist soldiers on a mission ordered by the military hierarchy. But the mission was cut short for reasons which only those who sent them can explain."