Niamey (AFP) – Zinder, Niger’s second city, was a “Black Friday”: the French Cultural Centre was set on fire and three churches ransacked by demonstrators opposed to the publication of a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad in a of the weekly Charlie Hhebdo.
Just after Friday prayers, “a human tide poured his anger on the streets of Zinder (south) to protest against the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad,” he told Amadou Mamane, a freelance journalist in Zinder.
SMS circulating since yesterday to protest at the exit of mosques. The same slogan, transmitted during religious services, was attended by thousands of people, according to an official source.
The demonstrators, according to Mr. Mamane were “mostly young, some a motorcycle waving little white flags, “the color of Islam, rushed to the Franco-Nigerian Cultural Centre (CNBC).
About fifty of them” broke the door “the complex to 1:30 p.m. entry (1230 GMT), despite” warning shots “of” two officers “present to protect the building, told AFP Kaoumi Bawa, CNBC director of Zinder.
Then they set fire to the cafeteria and the media library and administrative offices of the Centre, he continued. “It is still burning. The fire never came,” lamented Mr Bawa, “angry”, which “tries to save what could be.”
The protesters, who were still Assets at 18:45 (5:45 p.m. GMT), while the gendarmes came to lend a hand to the police to secure the city, were then attacked non-Muslim places of worship.
Three churches, one Catholic, two evangelicals, were vandalized, authorities said Zinder, a town in the south, near the border with Nigeria.
“We have never seen it in Zinder,” said a administrative source. “It’s a Black Friday.”
According to this source, the seat of the ruling party was also burned, and several bars and taverns.
– Center ‘unrecognizable’ -.
“The center of Zinder is unrecognizable the cry of Allah Akbar (Allah is the Greatest), the protesters in large numbers burned tires everywhere “testified a joint trader on the phone.
” bottles debris, burning tires and boulders still litter some streets, “described another journalist.
Niger, like Senegal, had nevertheless prohibited the distribution of the latest issue of Charlie Weekly, described as “insulting and totally unacceptable provocation” in order not to offend its population overwhelmingly Muslim.
But the Zinder protesters were violent, unlike the thousands of Senegalese who demonstrated Friday in front of the Embassy of France in Dakar, where a French flag was burned.
Thousands of protesters also marched in Mauritania and and Algeria. Outside Africa, demonstrations were held in several Muslim countries, including Jordan.
If the tricolor flag was burned by Palestinians in Jerusalem, the protest turned into a confrontation outside the consulate French in Karachi (Pakistan), where an AFP photographer was seriously injured.
Zinder, the former capital of Niger, had already experienced such excesses in September 2012. The Catholic Church, the largest the country had been totally ransacked by demonstrators protesting against a movie while denigrating Islam made in the United States.
The President of Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, is one of six Heads of State Africans who participated in the Republican march on 11 January in Paris, after the terrorist attack that decimated the drafting of the French weekly Charlie weekly.
“We are all Charlie”, recently said M . Issoufou on the air, a decision strongly criticized by Muslim associations and local NGOs position.
“His participation” in the works “stems from its commitment against terrorism and for freedom” and ” does not imply any support to the abuses that can arise from a certain conception of freedom of the press “had corrected Thursday Marou Amadou, the spokesman of the government.
No comments:
Post a Comment