The military government in West African Mali has confirmed the discovery of a mass grave.
This video footage shows soldiers burying bodies near an army base in northern Mali. According to the French military, they have videos of Russian mercenaries burying bodies near an army base in northern Mali.
(dpa/AP) The bodies found were in an advanced state of decomposition, the Malian military’s public relations department said on Saturday night. A patrol discovered the bodies last week not far from the Gossi base in the south of the country. The circumstances will be investigated.
France had previously accused Russian mercenaries of staging a mass grave there after the clearance of the Gossi military base in order to discredit France. The French military filmed with a drone how mercenaries brought bodies to the Gossi base and buried them shortly after the withdrawal, an army spokesman said on Friday. The video recordings show how the mercenaries filmed and photographed the dead. Pictures of the scene appeared on social networks with the comment that the dead were legacies from the French, about which one could not remain silent.
The French army speaks of a war of disinformation, which it has been exposed to in the Sahel for a long time and which it suspects are behind groups connected to Russia. The Russian mercenary group Wagner moved there after the base was handed over to Mali on April 19, and the army spokesman said they probably published the image and film material on social networks.
Mali’s interim government maintains close ties with Russia
The relationship between the military rulers in Bamako and the government in Paris is very tense. In February, the former colonial power and its international partners announced an end to the anti-terrorist operation in Mali and a coordinated withdrawal of combat troops. Mali, with its approximately 20 million inhabitants, has experienced three military coups since 2012 and is considered to be politically extremely unstable. Since the most recent coup in May, the country has been led by a transitional military government that is supposed to maintain close ties with Russia. Islamist terrorist groups have been troubling the crisis-ridden state for years.
Russia, for its part, has been conducting covert military operations in at least half a dozen African countries over the past five years, using a shadowy mercenary force analysts say are loyal to President Vladimir Putin. Accordingly, the mercenaries are also a key to Putin’s ambitions to restore Russian influence on a global scale.