Burkina Faso’s ex-leader Thomas Sankara is to be reburied this week

Ouagadougou,

The ponderable of Burkina Faso’s revolutionary chief Thomas Sankara shall be buried on Thursday alongside 12 comrades at the location the place they had been assassinated in a coup three many years in the past, the nation’s junta has pronounced.

No date had earlier been set for the reburial, which was introduced earlier this month.

“The burial of the remains of Captain Thomas Sankara and his twelve companions murdered on October 15, 1987 will take place on Thursday, February 23,” Communications parson Jean-Emmanuel Ouedraogo pronounced in a press unmuzzle on Friday.

Ouedraogo pronounced the ceremony – which Sankara’s loved ones has pronounced they shouldn’t attend – will happen “at the site of the Thomas Sankara memorial”, which was erected at the location of his assassination.

Sankara got here to potential in exalted 1983 as a military captain, aged 33.

Nicknamed Africa’s Che Guevara, he was a fiery Marxist-Leninist who blasted the West for neo-colonialism and hypocrisy.

He modified the nation’s title from colonial Higher Volta to Burkina Faso – “the land of the honest men” – and pushed using a collection of reforms, such as advertising vaccination and banning feminine genital mutilation.

Sankara was idolized by supporters of Pan-Africanism and equality, however his tenure was short-lived.

He and a dozen different leaders had been gunned down by a squad at a gathering of the ruling Country wide Revolutionary assembly within the capital, Ouagadougou.

The murders befell on the similar day that Sankara’s comrade-in-arms Blaise Compaore took potential.

He continued to rule for 27 years, in the course of which Sankara’s loss of life was a strict taboo. In 2014, he was ousted by public protests.

afterwards Compaore’s fall, the 13 our bodies had been exhumed from a cemetery on the outskirts of town for an examination.

It led to a prolonged trial that culminated in April 2022 with life imprisonment in absentia for Compaore and the suspected squad chief, and an analogous time period for a jailed average who had been military chief on the time.

In compassionate of this trial, the 13 must be buried “honorably,” the federal government pronounced earlier.