TWENTY people, including 13 soldiers, were killed in Sunday’s attack by gunmen on a military barracks and other locations in Sierra Leone, an army spokesman said on Monday.
The West African country was thrown into panic in the early hours of Sunday when the assailants attacked the barracks, a police station and a prison, sending gunfire ringing across the capital Freetown.
The government later blamed the attack on ‘renegade soldiers’ that it said had been repelled.
President Julius Maada Bio said in an address on Sunday that most of the leaders of the attack had been arrested and that efforts to apprehend others were under way. An investigation has been launched, he said.
Army spokesman Colonel Issa Bangura said the 20 dead also included three assailants, a policeman, a civilian and someone working in private security. Eight people were wounded and three arrested, he said.
Life returned to Freetown on Monday afternoon as shops and business opened after the government reduced an all-day curfew to a nightly one running from 2100-0600 GMT.
‘The task before us is too great and urgent to be derailed by those who seek to truncate the peace and security that we have enjoyed as a country,’ Bio said in the post on X.
Sierra Leone, which is still recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war in which more than 50,000 were killed, has been tense since Bio was re-elected in June, a result rejected by the main opposition candidate and questioned by international partners including the United States and the European Union.
In August 2022, at least 21 civilians and six police officers were killed in anti-government protests.
The gunmen also released inmates from the Pademba Road central prison on Sunday. In the surrounding neighbourhood, people went about their business on Monday as Bio’s Chief Minister David Moinina Sengeh visited.
‘Cleaning started, and prisoners are already turning themselves in,’ Sengeh said on a post on X.
