One of Mali's most impenetrable police enigmas may have found the beginning of a solution, with the questioning of a suspect in the investigation into the beheading of ten people since 2018 in Fana (South), a- we learned Monday, January 30 from judicial and police sources.
“
We have arrested the main suspect in the murder of ten people in Fana
,” Boubacar Moussa Diarra, prosecutor at the court in this locality, several dozen kilometers east of Bamako, told AFP.
Fana, deadly theater since 2018
“
The individual, aged 42, is an unemployed Malian national with no fixed address.
The details he gives of the crimes correspond to what happened
, ”said the magistrate reached by telephone.
The suspect had already been suspected in the past for one of the murders, but had been exonerated for lack of incriminating evidence, he added.
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A senior police officer speaking on condition of anonymity under prevailing rules said the individual was arrested a year ago but only confessed last week.
Neither the prosecutor nor the police officer said what his motives might have been.
Fana, a cotton-producing and commercial city of 36,000 inhabitants built along the national road linking the capital to Ségou, has been the scene since 2018 of a series of beheadings that have remained without author or motive, the last of which reported dates back to August 2021.
The blood collected from the victims
Like the south of the country, the city is rather preserved by jihadist actions, inter-community violence and abuses of all kinds that have been raging for years in the North and the center.
The victims, a housewife, a telephone antenna attendant, a five-year-old albino child or a two-year-old girl, did not have much in common.
In the majority of cases, the heads of the victims had been found, but the perpetrator(s) had collected the blood, which reinforced the widespread belief in the population of occult practices where blood could, for example, be used to impregnate fetishes.
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Justice has remained cautious until now on ritual or villainous hypotheses.
An investigator speaking on condition of anonymity urged "
caution
".
“
The investigations are continuing.
This week will be decisive
,” he said.
The first killings prompted protests against the authorities and looting.
A police station opened in early 2019 and, for the first time, Fana saw police officers patrolling alongside the gendarmes and national guards already present.