Tension is easing slightly in Senegal, where deadly clashes have left 15 people dead since Thursday after opposition politician Ousmane Sonko was sentenced to two years in prison.
The Minister of the Interior, Antoine Diome, reported a drop in the intensity of the demonstrations since Saturday. Although clashes were reported on Saturday in the suburbs of Dakar, several districts in the capital that had seen outbreaks of violence on Thursday and Friday remained calm.
Mr Diome said that “around 500 arrests” had been made since the beginning, the majority of them non-partisan.
The minister also said that Senegal had been attacked “by occult forces” and that “installations vital to the functioning of the country” had been targeted to cause “chaos”, citing a water production plant in particular.
Earlier in the day, Tourism Minister Mame Mbaye Niang said that these attacks were targeting the country and that it must not give in to “these groups or these foreigners who have come to plunder the country”. The army has deployed around the country’s strategic points to secure them and prevent further attacks.
Since Thursday, many public and private properties have been ransacked and looted, including banks and Auchan shops in the Dakar suburbs. Some streets bear the scars of the violent clashes that have taken place over the past two days, with burnt-out cars, burnt tyres and large stones littering the roads.
The United States said on Saturday that it was “concerned and saddened” by the violence and called for a return to calm.
On Friday, the international community, representatives of associations and celebrities called for restraint and an end to the violence in the country.
Several social networks, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter, were still cut off on Saturday evening, a measure taken by the government to stop “the dissemination of hateful and subversive messages”.