Six people, including a priest, have died after gunmen opened fire while Mass was being celebrated in a Catholic church in the country’s north on Sunday.
It has been reported that 20 to 30 attackers on motorcycles shot and killed six people at the church in Dablo before setting fire to it and other buildings nearby including a medical facility.
The mayor was reported as saying that the attack had created an “atmosphere of panic” in the town.
It is the third such attack on a a church in the region in the past five weeks with at least six people dying in an attack on a Protestant church in Silgadji last month and four more people dying after a Catholic church was attacked in Dori earlier in April, according to the report of a Catholic bishop.
No-one has reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack as yet, but Burkina Faso, where an Islamist insurgency flared up in the north in 2016, is one of several countries in the region battling such insurgencies.
A report from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies shows violent incidents attributed to organisations affiliated to al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State in Burkina Faso rose from 29 in 2017 to 137 in 2018.
