Sierra Leone’s Foreign Minister, Prof. David Francis is reported to have said Sierra Leone is part of the ECOWAS common position that condemns the attempted coup in Guinea and calls for the immediate release of President Alpha Conde.
It can be recalled that past Sunday,mutinous soldiers in Guinea detained President Alpha Conde after hours of heavy gunfire rang out near the presidential palace in the capital, then announced on state television that the government had been dissolved in an apparent coup d’état.
The country’s borders were closed, and its constitution also was declared invalid in the announcement read aloud on state television by army Col. Mamadi Doumbouya, who told Guineans: “The duty of a soldier is to save the country.”
Conde’s whereabouts had been unknown for hours after the intense fighting Sunday in downtown Conakry until a video emerged showing the 83-year-old leader tired and disheveled in military custody. It was not immediately known when or where the video was taken, though a soldier’s voice can be heard asking Conde whether the putschists had harmed him in any way.
Doumbouya, the commander of the army’s special forces unit, later addressed the nation from state television headquarters, draped in a Guinean flag with about a half dozen other soldiers flanked at his side.
“We will no longer entrust politics to one man; we will entrust it to the people,” Doumbouya said, without mentioning Conde by name or where he was being held.