— French helicopters on an evacuation mission were fired upon by forces supporting the country’s strongman as they tried to retain power in Ivory Coast’s largest city, a military spokesman said Saturday.
No French soldiers were injured in the attack late Friday, but French forces fired back destroying one armored vehicle, Cmdr. Frederic Daguillon said. The mission to evacuate diplomats from an embassy was aborted, he said. The attack came the same night that France’s embassy was hit by two mortars and a rocket fired by forces for Laurent Gbagbo, who refuses to cede power or emerge from a bunker at his residence.
On Friday, internationally recognized president Ouattara imposed a blockade around Gbagbo’s presidential residence, and said he’ll focus on normalizing life in the corpse-strewn, terrorized city. He said his troops will work to secure Abidjan, where people have hidden inside their homes this week amid heavy fighting between troops loyal to Ouattara and those who are with Gbagbo.
French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet estimates that Gbagbo has some 1,000 troops, compared to the 2,000-strong force that has been fighting to install Ouattara.
As the military standoff dragged on in Abidjan, there are new concerns about tensions erupting into deadly violence in the country’s west. The U.N. said Friday more than 100 bodies have been found in the last 24 hours, and some of the victims had been burned alive. “The reports that the U.N. human rights team in Cote d’Ivoire are sending back are utterly horrifying,” U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said in a statement Friday. “They are finding more bodies every day.”
The U.N. human rights chief condemned the series of extremely vicious attacks against civilians and cautioned that those atrocities may amount to crimes against humanity. The U.N. said peacekeepers and human rights officials discovered about 60 bodies in the western town of Guiglo. The U.N. human rights agency said another 40 corpses were found lying the street in Blolequin, and many of them had been shot. Fifteen other bodies were found in Duekoue, where violence already has left at least 229 dead in recent weeks.
