On July 4, 2015, Tié Traoré, a journalist with the L’Inter, an independent Ivorian daily, was arrested in Fakola, Mali which is about 20 km away from Côte d’Ivoire.
The journalist had gone to Fakola on July 3, to report on an attack perpetrated there on June 28, allegedly by Ansar Dine jihadists. On June 30, the said jihadists had reportedly announced that they would attack Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania, countries they accused of being “enemies of Islam.”
The MFWA’s correspondent in Cote d’Ivoire reported that Traoré was arrested by Malian soldiers who accused him of “not being authorized by the Malian authorities’’ to enter Mali. They thus accused him of entering the country illegally and conspiring with the jihadists.
“He was mistaken for a jihadist or at least a collaborator, and treated as such before being sent to the Kolondieba prefecture under which falls the town of Fakola, where he was questioned before he was transferred to the Ivorian security authorities at Tengrela,” the MFWA’s correspondent said.
After a tough interrogation session, he was extradited to Côte d’Ivoire and handed over to the Prefect of Tengrela in the northern part of the country. The Prefect subsequently transferred him to the Gendarmerie which sent him to Korhogo, the capital of Korhogo Department in northern Côte d’Ivoire.
Traoré was finally sent to the Territorial Company of the Korhogo Gendarmerie and interrogated for a second time before he was returned to Abidjan. In Abijan, the investigation brigade questioned him again about his presence in Mali in the presence of the editor-in-chief of L’Inter, Ziao Hamidou.
