Regrets that his request to find another place for the remains of the former president, assassinated during a coup in 1987, was ignored
22 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The family of the revolutionary leader and icon of pan-Africanism Thomas Sankara, assassinated in 1987 after a coup d’état, has announced that it will not attend the events planned this Thursday for the reburial of his remains due to their disagreement with the place chosen by the Burkinabe authorities faso.
“The relatives of President Thomas Sankara confirm that the reburial of the remains of Thomas Sankara is maintained in the Council of the Entente (now Thomas Sankara Memorial),” he said in a statement, after expressing his rejection of it being carried out. here.
For this reason, he stressed that the family “will not be present at the funeral and will not be represented by anyone.” “Anyone who attends this ceremony and claims to act on behalf of the family will not have any mandate,” he has concluded.
The family of Sankara, a Marxist revolutionary who led the country between 1983 and 1987, last week demanded a “presidential grace” from the leader of the military junta, Ibrahim Traoré, so that his remains are not buried in the Thomas Sankara Memorial and proposed alternative places. Thus, he maintained that the burial of the remains of the former Burkinabe president in these places would mean his “second death”.
“We want to bury Thomas to finally grieve and may his soul rest in peace. Our family is still going through a hard ordeal, seeing Thomas buried against our will in the place where he was killed, that is, in the Council of the Entente”, he stressed, before stressing that Sankara “did not die by accident, but in a well-orchestrated plot”.
Sankara was assassinated in 1987 along with twelve officers after being captured after a coup. His corpse was dismembered and buried in an anonymous grave. Former President Blaise Compaoré, who succeeded Sankara after the coup and fled the country in 2014 amid protests against his intention to amend the Constitution to run for re-election, was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2022.
