Gunmen killed a priest and five churchgoers during mass in an attack on a Catholic church in central Burkina Faso on Sunday.
According to the Burkina Information Agency, Gunmen came on motorcycles and stormed the church in Dablo on Sunday morning, killing six men, before setting fire to the church and buildings in the town of Dablo, about 200km from the capital Ouagadougou.
They torched several shops before heading to the local health center, which they looted and then torched the chief nurse’s vehicle.
“Towards 9 am, during mass, armed individuals burst into the Catholic church,” said Ousmane Zongo, the mayor of Dablo. “They started firing as the congregation tried to flee. They killed five of them. The priest, who was celebrating mass, was also killed.”
Zongo said that there is an atmosphere of panic in the town and people are all holed up in their homes, nothing is going on.
“The shops and stores are closed. It’s practically a ghost town,” he added.
No group has taken responsibility for the latest attack in Dablo. The attack follows an operation conducted by French Special Forces who freed four foreign hostages in the north of the country in an overnight raid that cost the lives of two soldiers.
The operation was launched to free two French hostages Patrick Picque and Laurent Lassimouillas, who suddenly disappeared while on holiday in the remote Pendjari national park in Benin on May 1.
The Special Forces team also found two female captives, an American woman and a South Korean national. During the operation, two French soldiers were killed along with four kidnappers.
Burkina Faso has seen increasingly frequent and deadly attacks in the last few years, attributed to a number of jihadist groups, including the Ansarul Islam group, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and the Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM). Nearly 400 people have been killed since 2015.
