Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday said Malian troops and suspected foreign soldiers killed about 300 civilian men over five days during a military operation in a central town, reported Africa News.
According to HRW, Malian army troops and foreign soldiers in late March rounded up several hundred men and shot dead about 300 of them, burying many in mass graves and burning others. The killings took place between March 27 and 31 in Moura, a rural town of around 10,000 inhabitants in the Mopti region.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the international rights group said there had been a “deliberate slaughter” of people detained in the central town of Moura.
“Abuses by armed Islamist groups is no justification at all for the military’s deliberate slaughter of people in custody,” said Corinne Dufka, HRW’s Sahel director.
She added that the Malian government is responsible for the atrocity, the worst in Mali in a decade, whether carried about by Malian forces or foreign mercenaries.
HRW pointed out that Moura town is under the “quasi-control” of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim). It said some of those killed were jihadists but that a number of them were killed simply because they had been forced by the same jihadists to cut their pants and grow their beards.
On Saturday, Mali’s military admitted that it had killed more than 200 militants in a “large-scale” assault in Moura. They also claimed to have arrested about fifty militants, acting on intelligence reports that armed extremists were meeting in Moura.
The incident sparked condemnation from the United States, the European Union, France, and Germany, who have all called on the Malian government to launch an independent investigation into the matter.
MINUSMA, the United Nations mission in the Sahelian nation, has said it is still waiting for authorization from the transitional authorities to launch its fact-finding mission in Moura.
