Côte d’Ivoire calls on Mali to release 49 Ivorian soldiers “unjustly” detained

July 13 (EUROPA PRESS) –

Côte d’Ivoire has asked Mali on Tuesday to release the 49 Ivorian soldiers detained “unjustly” on Sunday at Bamako airport and accused by the authorities of this country of being “mercenaries”.

Mali’s military junta confirmed on Monday the arrest of 49 Ivorian soldiers at the airport in the capital, Bamako, and stressed that it considers them to be “mercenaries” who were carrying “weapons and ammunition of war, as well as other military equipment.”

“No Ivorian soldier from this contingent was in possession of weapons and ammunition when he got off the plane,” the Malian Presidency said in a statement after a National Security Council held on Tuesday.

In this sense, the Ivorian authorities have assured that the soldiers were in Mali “as part of the logistics operations of the national support elements” to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).

The spokesman for the transitional government of Mali, Abdoulaye Maiga, said in a statement that all of them were arrested on Sunday around 11:15 am (local time) after the landing of two aircraft arriving from the Ivory Coast.

For his part, the MINUSMA spokesman, Olivier Salgado, said through his Twitter account that the detained soldiers “were not part of one of the MINUSMA contingents.”