Ivory Coast rebels take more towns

Rebel troops in Ivory Coast have seized more towns in a bloody military uprising that has so far cost the lives of around 270 people.

Prime Minister Affi Nguessan said a government offensive was imminent. “Our forces are on the move and we hope in the coming hours that we will see the results on the ground,” he told state radio.

Rebels still control the northern opposition stronghold of Korhogo and the central town of Boauke, 220 miles north of Abidjan, the commercial capital. President Laurent Gbagbo has pledged a full-scale battle to remove the rebels.

But there were reports the rebels were widening their power base.

A security official in neighbouring Burkina Faso said rebels had attacked and were now controlling other northern cities, including Katiola, Ferkessedougou and Ouangolodougou, on the border with Burkina Faso. It was not immediately possible to independently verify the claim.

State television said yesterday that some 270 people had been killed, and 300 injured in fighting since Thursday’s failed coup but it did not give any breakdown of the casualties and said the figures were provisional.

In Abidjan, paramilitary police set fire to a mainly Muslim shanty town – the rising smoke an ominous sign that the latest bloodletting was descending into ethnic and religious violence.

Frightened residents – many workers from Burkina Faso and other Muslim countries to the north said paramilitary police were setting fire to makeshift shacks, beating the occupants, and leading many away.

Newly homeless people pushed carts piled with mattresses, suitcases, and televisions along, seeking shelter elsewhere.

Western embassies warned of gangs of government supporters armed with machetes roaming the streets of Abidjan, in more tranquil times once called the Paris of West Africa.

The armed bands were attacking foreigners from surrounding Muslim countries, and had chased foreign students from Cocody University in Abidjan, the youth wing of a mainly Muslim opposition party claimed.

Signs that Thursday’s attempted coup was morphing into new ethnic conflict were evident as well in Korhogo.

Rebels told residents of the largely Muslim city that the government had recruited Angolan soldiers to “kill northerners” and urged young men to take up arms and join them.

The former French colony’s plummet into chaos began before dawn on Thursday. Insurgents, apparently including hundreds of recently sacked soldiers, launched coordinated attacks on military installations, government sites, and Cabinet ministers’ houses in five cities and towns.

Loyalist forces quelled the uprising in Abidjan, but scores of government forces were killed, including a Cabinet minister, senior military officers and dozens of paramilitary police.

Paramilitary police shot and killed the deposed junta chief whom the government accuses in the coup attempt, General Robert Guei. Paramilitary police also killed his wife, son and grandchildren.

This latest coup attempt shattered efforts to restore stability to once-tranquil Ivory Coast after its first-ever coup in 1999. The mayhem in Ivory Coast – the world’s largest cocoa producer, and still an economic anchor in West Africa – raised fears that the nation was falling into the endemic violence that has ravaged neighbours Liberia and Sierra Leone.