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This is the second time in a few months that a French airstrike has resulted in fatalities. The French army claims they are jihadists, while local notables say they are civilians.
Mohamed Al-Saleh Ahmed, mayor of Talatayi, located between the cities of Gao and Menaka, told AFP that the dead were six young people from the village who died in an airstrike on Thursday and were buried the same day.
“They were a group of young people, including minors, who decided to spend the day outside of Talatay on three motorcycles, armed with a hunting rifle, to shoot rabbits and partridges,” he added.
The mayor said that four of the dead were under 16 and the rest were 18 and 20 years old.
He added: “Eyewitnesses reported explosions and confirmed that they saw planes in the air. It is impossible to know if they were French planes or not.”
“So when the news spread to the town, it was decided to send people and a car to the site to recover the six bodies that were buried in the Talatay cemetery,” he said.
On the other hand, the French force Barkhane to combat the jihadists published a statement on Thursday night in which it gave a completely different account of what appeared to be the same event, as the statement spoke of carrying out an air strike. at the same time and place, that is, around noon and 60 kilometers north of Indelemany.
Barkhan said in his statement that “after a phase of recognition and verification that allowed the identification of an armed terrorist group and its concentration, an air strike was launched to neutralize” this group.
The statement did not specify how many people were killed in the raid, saying only that it resulted in “the destruction of three motorcycles.”
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