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By AFP 
2h ago
Nairobi, Kenya – Former Burundi president Pierre Buyoya died in Paris of Covid-19 at the age of 71, several close relatives told AFP.
“President Pierre Buyoya died last night in Paris. He had Covid-19,” a member of his family told AFP, requesting anonymity.
Several other family members confirmed the death of Buyoya, who served as the African Union’s special envoy to Mali and the Sahel from 2012 to November this year.
Buyoya “had been hospitalized on Wednesday last week in Bamako, where he was placed on a respirator,” the relative said.
“He was evacuated to Paris yesterday afternoon. His plane made a stopover and arrived in France in the evening. He died when the ambulance took him to hospital in Paris for treatment,” the source said.
Buyoya resigned as an African Union envoy in late November after being sentenced to life imprisonment in Burundi the previous month for the murder of his successor in 1993, which he denounced on political grounds.
Buyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, came to power for the first time in Burundi, one of the smallest countries in Africa, with a coup in 1987.
He resigned in 1993 in the country’s first democratic elections in which he was viciously beaten by Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu.
But hardline Tutsi soldiers killed Ndadaye just four months after the work began.
His assassination plunged Burundi into years of civil war between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi.
Buyoya became president again after a coup, ruling from 1996 to 2003.
In 2000, he signed the Arusha Accords, an agreement aimed at ending the civil war that left some 300,000 people dead between 1993 and 2006. He resigned in 2003 in accordance with the accords.
str-np / dl / wdb
© Agence France-Presse
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