Armed attackers killed a priest and five worshippers during mass on Sunday in an attack on a Catholic church in northern Burkina Faso.
The attackers – numbering between 20 and 30 – managed to trap some of the people inside then set fire to the church in the town of Dablo, about 200km from the capital Ouagadougou.
Several shops were also torched before they headed to the local health centre, which they looted and then torched the chief nurse’s vehicle.
“Towards 9am, 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, bringing the number of dead to six.”
Urbain Kabore, a government spokesman for the West African country’s Sahel region, said the attackers also destroyed all places serving alcohol.
Zongo said there was “an atmosphere of panic in the town”.
“People are holed up in their homes, nothing is going on. The shops and stores are closed. It’s practically a ghost town,” he said.
Security reinforcements were sent from Barsalogho, about 45km south of Dablo, and were combing the area.
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The attack came two days after French special forces freed four foreign hostages in the north of the country in an overnight raid that cost the lives of two soldiers.
The operation was ordered to free French hostages Patrick Picque and Laurent Lassimouillas who disappeared while on holiday in the remote Pendjari National Park in Benin on May 1.
The team also found two female captives, an American woman and a South Korean national.
Sunday’s church bloodshed came two weeks after a similar attack against a Protestant church in Silgadji, also in the north, when gunmen on motorbikes killed a pastor and several worshippers.