Burkina Faso’s ousted President, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, “is physically well” and is being held by the army in a villa, a source in his party said on Wednesday.
The source who had earlier narrated the circumstances under which the president was forced to leave power could however not say anything about his state of mind but says “he has a doctor at his disposal.
The source from the People’s Movement for Progress told Newsmen that it was he who wrote the letter of resignation published by national television, but could not confirm under what conditions he wrote it.
Giving a time-line of events, the source continued that Kabore was not arrested in the first hours of the mutinous soldiers’ action. Rather his private residence was cordoned off by the mutineers, and it was necessary for his close guard to use strategy by exfiltrating him on board an unmarked vehicle to put him in a safe place.
She said It was later and under pressure from the mutineers, that his guards – notably gendarmes – had to leave him in their hands (of the coup plotters), and rally to them in the process.
According to her, the gendarmerie could only rally because the entire army was willing to remove the president from office.
Shortly before the announcement of the putsch and while Kaboré’s fate was unclear Monday after two days of mutiny in the barracks, the MPP denounced in a statement “an aborted assassination attempt” on the president.
Roch Marc Christian Kaboré was overthrown by the military led by a lieutenant colonel, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, president of a junta called the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR) that has taken over the country plagued by jihadist violence.
