Senegal: Prime Minister Sonko’s convoy attacked while campaigning for snap polls ⁰

The party of Senegal’s Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko said Thursday that his convoy was attacked a day earlier while he was campaigning for upcoming parliamentary elections.

The West African nation is due to vote in snap legislative polls on November 17 after President Bassirou Diomaye Faye dissolved the opposition-dominated parliament in September.

Sonko was unharmed in Wednesday’s attack, but a former minister and head of a party allied to Sonko’s Pastef party suffered a broken arm, according to local media reports.

His party published a photo purporting to show his arm in a sling with a bloodied sleeve.

Sonko’s convoy was pelted with stones in the central town of Koungheul on Wednesday evening, Vieux Aidara, a member of his campaign team, told AFP.

“The rapid intervention of the police dispersed the attackers,” he added.

“Violence has no place in an election. In Koungheul, they tried and they only tried because frankly, attacking… Pastef is suicide,” Sonko said on social media, without identifying the attackers.

Media reports quoted local opposition leader and MP Fanta Sall as saying that opposition activists had themselves been targeted by armed “strongmen” acting on behalf of Pastef.

She said that several people had been injured.

An attack by unknown assailants targeted the headquarters of an opposition party in the capital Dakar on Monday, the day after the campaign period began, local media reported.

The attackers targeted vehicles, smashed windows and started a fire, the reports said.

Senegalese civil society figures, including Amnesty International’s Seydi Gassama and Birahim Seck from Transparency International, condemned the violence in Koungheul on social media.

President Faye and Prime Minister Sonko took office in April after sweeping to victory on a ticket of radical change, but their first six months in power have been marked by confrontation with the national assembly.

Their party is aiming for a legislative majority in November to see through their promises of social justice, sovereignty and leftist Pan-Africanism.

At the end of October, Faye called for those involved in the election to show “responsibility, restraint and moderation”.

Source: AFP