Nine people were killed Thursday in Senegal in the violence that erupted after the two-year prison sentence of opponent Ousmane Sonko, presidential candidate of 2024 and more than ever threatened with ineligibility. "We noted with regret violence that led to the destruction of public and private property and, unfortunately, nine deaths in Dakar and Ziguinchor" (south), Interior Minister Antoine Diome said in a short message broadcast by national television at night.
He also confirmed that the authorities had restricted access to social networks, which was observed for example for Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter. "Having noted the dissemination of hateful and subversive messages on social networks, the State of Senegal in all sovereignty has decided to temporarily suspend the use of certain digital applications," he said. He called for calm and assured that the state was taking "all necessary security measures".
Ousmane Sonko, third in the 2019 presidential election and fiercest opponent of President Macky Sall, was sentenced Thursday by a criminal chamber to two years in prison for "corruption of youth", an offense which consists of promoting "debauchery" of a young person under the age of 21.
He was accused of rape and death threats against an employee of a beauty salon where he was going to have a massage between 2020 and 2021. The employee, Adji Sarr, was under 21 at the time of the facts she denounces. The court acquitted Ousmane Sonko of charges of rape and death threats. The issue was as penal as it was political. The decision seems, in view of the Electoral Code, to result in the ineligibility of Ousmane Sonko.
Ousmane Sonko was absent when the judgment was delivered, as he was during his trial. He is presumed blocked by the security forces at his home in the capital, "kidnapped" according to him. But after two years of a confrontation with the authorities that kept the country in suspense, he can now be arrested "at any time", Justice Minister Ismaïla Madior Fall told reporters. Without waiting for such an arrest, the dreaded troubles before the deliberation broke out in Dakar and in several cities.
The University of Dakar has taken on the air of a battlefield. Groups of young people threw stones at the police, retaliating with tear gas. Several buses from the medical school, the history department and the country's main school of journalism were set on fire and offices ransacked. Clashes and looting of public property, shops and petrol stations have been reported in Dakar and its suburbs, but also in Ziguinchor (south), where several people were killed, in Mbour and Kaolack (west) or Saint- Louis (north).
Ousmane Sonko has continued to deny the accusations, shouting at the machinations of power to remove him from the presidential election. "This verdict on command is the final stage of the plot hatched by Macky Sall and his henchmen", reacted in a press release the party of Ousmane Sonko, Pastef, which called on the Senegalese to "take to the streets" and the forces order to join them.
The owner of the beauty salon Sweet Beauté, Ndèye Khady Ndiaye, was also sentenced to two years in prison for incitement to debauchery, but acquitted of complicity in rape. "We are satisfied with Sonko's guilt," Me El Hadji Diouf, Adji Sarr's lawyer, told reporters. But 20 million CFA francs (30,000 euros) in damages is little for the "suffering" she endured, he lamented.
