In Sierra Leone, a West African country, President Julius Maada Bio imposed a nationwide curfew after an armed attack on a military base and prison in the capital Freetown on Sunday. For hours the government claimed to have the situation under control, but multiple witness accounts reported explosions, gunfire and groups of armed men in the city. Currently, the news coming in is largely confusing and fragmentary, and it is not clear whether the attacks are part of a larger operation against the government.
In the morning, Information Minister Chernor Bah announced that some unidentified people had tried to enter an army armory in the Wilberforce district, where various embassies are located, and that they had been turned away. Shortly afterwards, there was an armed attack on the city’s main prison: a government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Portal that those responsible for the attack had freed several people from the prison. A prison official also told BBC News that some inmates escaped after the attack.
It is currently unclear how many people have fled. According to a US State Department report cited by Portal, Freetown Prison has a capacity of 324 people, but in 2019 it held more than two thousand people. About a million people live in Freetown, about an eighth of Sierra Leone’s total population.
A Portal journalist interviewed some armed and masked people he met in Freetown on Sunday. “We will clean up this society.” “We are not angry with the civilian population, who should continue to live normally,” one of them said.
In recent hours, several journalists reported hearing several gunshots after the government said it had the situation under control. An Associated Press journalist said he heard gunshots several hours after the first government statements, adding that it was unclear who fired and whether the government had made any arrests.
In June, Bio was re-elected for a second term. However, according to international observers from the European Union and the United States, the elections took place without the necessary conditions of transparency from the electoral authorities. Bio is a former soldier who was involved in two coups during the civil war in the 1990s and until 2002; In 1996 he ruled the country at the head of a military junta. In August, some soldiers were arrested on charges of organizing a coup to overthrow Bio, according to BBC News.