LAGOS FEBRUARY 24TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Burkina Faso’s most famous revolutionary Thomas Sankara has been reburied in the capital by the military junta – despite his widow and children boycotting the funeral. Sankara was laid to rest at the spot where he was assassinated in 1987. His immediate family wanted the reburial at a site that would “appease…
LAGOS FEBRUARY 4TH (NEWSRANGERS)-The body of Burkina Faso’s revered revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara is to be buried alongside 12 comrades at the spot where in 1987 they were assassinated, the country’s ruling junta said on Friday. The ceremony will take place “in February” at the site of a memorial that already marks the location, the…
LAGOS JULY 27TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Burkina Faso’s former president Blaise Compaore, sentenced in absentia to life in jail for the 1987 assassination of revolutionary icon Thomas Sankara, apologised to the ex-leader’s family on Tuesday. “I ask the Burkinabe people for forgiveness for all the acts I may have committed during my tenure, and especially the family of…
LAGOS MAY 10TH (NEWSRANGERS)-A court in Burkina Faso on Tuesday ordered ex-president Blaise Compaore and nine others to pay more than a million dollars in damages to relatives of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and aides who were assassinated in 1987. The order comes after a trial last month that sentenced the group to long jail…
LAGOS APRIL 9TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Lawyers for the family of ex-Burkina Faso leader Thomas Sankara on Thursday demanded former president Blaise Compaore be extradited after he received a life term in absentia over the revolutionary icon’s 1987 assassination. A military court on Wednesday sentenced Compaore — who seized power in a 1987 coup coinciding with Sankara’s death…
LAGOS APRIL 6TH (NEWSRANGERS)-Burkina Faso’s former president Blaise Compaore was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for complicity in the 1987 murder of his predecessor Thomas Sankara in a coup, a military tribunal ruled on Wednesday. The charismatic Marxist revolutionary Sankara was gunned down in the West African nation’s capital Ouagadougou at the age of…
LAGOS FEBRUARY 2ND (NEWSRANGERS)-The long-awaited trial on the killing of Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s influential leftist leader killed more than three decades ago, has been suspended as a result of the West African country’s recent coup. The trial has been paused until the constitution is reestablished, a lawyer for the prosecution said Monday. The suspension…
LAGOS NOVEMBER 10TH (NEWSRANGERS)-General Gilbert Diendere, a key defendant in a trial over the 1987 assassination of Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, pleaded not guilty at the landmark proceedings on Tuesday. The trial, unfolding in a military court in the capital Ouagadougou, is being avidly followed in a country where Sankara’s brutal death 34…