Comoros: President’s attacker dead, according to public prosecutor

The perpetrator of the knife attack that “slightly injured” Comoros President Azali Assoumani on Friday died in circumstances that are still unknown while in the hands of investigators, the Moroni public prosecutor announced on Saturday. President Azali Assoumani, 65, “was slightly injured with a knife” on Friday evening while attending the funeral of a religious dignitary in a small town overlooking Moroni, the presidency announced on Friday evening, specifying that the assailant had been handed over to the “security services”.

“He was isolated in a room to calm down yesterday (Friday) after his arrest” and “when investigators showed up this (Saturday) morning to question him, they found him lying on the ground, unconscious,” said the prosecutor, Ali Mohamed Djounaid, during a press conference at the courthouse in the capital of the archipelago. “The doctor showed up and after examining him, he confirmed his death,” he added.

The attacker is said to be a 24-year-old soldier.

The magistrate specified that the attacker was a young 24-year-old soldier, named Ahmed Abdou and nicknamed “Fanon”, originally from the small town of Salimani-Itsandra, where the funeral was taking place and where he attacked the president on Friday afternoon.

According to the prosecutor, he “used a kitchen knife”, injuring two people, a relative of the deceased notable and President Azali. “The president’s security agents immediately subdued the young man and handed him over to investigators”, he added, but they “did not have time to question him” between his arrest and his death.

“An investigation is underway to understand the circumstances or reasons that led the young (man) to want to attempt the life of the president. There will also be an investigation that will elucidate the circumstances of his death,” he continued, while specifying that the body had been handed over to his family, seeming to indicate that no autopsy has been requested by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

The Comorian president “in his residence, in the company of his family”

A member of Ahmed Abdou’s family, who requested anonymity, told AFP that the washing of his body was underway and that he would be “buried shortly”, in accordance with Muslim tradition, the religion followed by almost all of the 870,000 or so inhabitants of the three islands of this small, poor archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

Azali Assoumani “is doing very well,” government spokeswoman Fatima Ahamada assured on Saturday morning, during a press conference attended by almost the entire government and the governors of two of the three islands. “Ultimately it is more fear than harm,” she added. The Comorian president was, however, absent. He “is in his residence, with his family,” explained the Minister of Energy, Aboubacar Saïd Anli.

The speakers refused, “in the name of medical confidentiality”, to reveal the nature or extent of the head of state’s injuries. Aboubacar Said Anli, however, suggested that he had been hit in the “scalp, an area that bleeds a lot”, requiring “stitches”. No image of the head of state has been published since the attack.

Ahmed Abdou, described by a source close to the presidency as a gendarme who had been enlisted for two years, had not, according to the prosecutor, returned to his unit after a “24-hour leave” on September 11. According to a witness to the attack, who refused to give his identity, “the assailant was like a madman, he threw himself on the head of state”, who was on a terrace of the deceased notable’s house. “He first attacked him with a knife before beating him up,” he said on Saturday. “Without the person who intervened, I strongly believe that the head of state would not have survived.”