The four main defendants of the Grand Bassam attack, which killed 19 people in March 2016, were sentenced by the Abidjan criminal court on Wednesday, December 28, to life imprisonment.

On March 13, 2016, three young assailants walked up Grand Bassam beach, which is very popular with foreigners, then stormed several restaurants, firing Kalashnikovs at customers on the terrace, before being shot dead by security forces. Ivorians.

Claimed by the branch of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqmi), this jihadist attack, the first to occur in Côte d'Ivoire, had killed 19 people, including four French.               

In addition to the four French, nine Ivorians, a Lebanese, a German, a Macedonian, a Malian, a Nigerian and an unidentified person were killed during the attack and 33 people of various nationalities injured.

A key suspect captured in 2017

During the trial, many witnesses to the attack, including the owner of one of the targeted hotels and a member of the special forces, who shot the attackers, came to tell the story of March 13, 2016 at the stand.

In January 2017, soldiers from the French Barkhane force captured a key suspect, Mimi Ould Baba Ould Cheikh, considered by the Ivorian authorities as one of the masterminds of the attack, and by the Burkinabè authorities as the "head of operations" of another attack that killed 30 people in Ouagadougou in January 2016.

Perpetrated in retaliation for the anti-jihadist operations Serval and Barkhane carried out by France and its allies in the Sahel region, the attack on Grand-Bassam also targeted Côte d'Ivoire, which had delivered members of AQIM to the Malian authorities.

In 2020 and 2021, the defense and security forces were targeted by deadly attacks attributed to jihadist groups in the north of Côte d'Ivoire, which has not, however, seen any more attacks against civilians since that of Grand Bassam.

The attack severely tested the tourism sector in this country, already weakened by the post-election crisis of 2010-2011 which left some 3,000 dead.

With AFP

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