Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza has sacked his Foreign and Defence Ministers after an attempted military coup that followed widespread protests against Nkurunziza's decision to seek a third term.
17 officials are accused of links to the failed coup including military and police generals. Heavily armed soldiers have been deployed in the capital Bujumbura and witnesses report seeing soldiers fire live rounds at groups of unarmed protestors. At least one person was shot.
Police are no longer on the streets and the army, which previously acted as a buffer between protesters and the police, has now taken over operations against demonstrators.
Meanwhile regional leaders are putting pressure on President Nkurunziza to delay the June 26th election; however, East African heads of state have stopped short of endorsing Burundian protestors calls for Nkurunziza to drop his attempt to run for a third term.
On Sunday Nkurunziza attempted to convince the public, in his first appearance since last week’s failed coup, that the potential for a terrorist attack by the Somali extremist group Al Shabaab was a concern for all Burundian citizens.
However, Nkurunziza’s tactic appeared to backfire when Al Shabaab issued the following statement.
"We think that this is an attempt by him to appease his people, who are standing in the streets protesting against his dictatorship, or to divert the world's attention from him while he possibly prepares his mass revenge," al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mahamud Rage said in a statement to Reuters news agency.
Protests are ongoing in Bujumbura at the time of this writing. Burundi has been in crisis since Nkurunziza pushed for a third term of office, which his opponents say breaks the constitution and a 2005 peace agreement that ended an ethnically driven civil war. As many as 300,000 people died in the war and there are fears the current crisis could inflame lingering tensions between the majority Hutu population and the Tutsi minority.
