Some Polisario elements are once again involved in a drug affair at the frontiers between Mali and Algeria. A clan fight has started in the night of Saturday to Sunday, in a small desert village located between the North of Mali and the extreme South of Algeria. A unity counting many armed element from the Polisario was sent from Rabouni by the Chief of the movement for the Sahara independence, Mohamed Abdelaziz, to be on the spot to release, at any cost, a Polisario civil executive and two soldiers taken as hostages by a band of drug traffickers based in the Algero-Malian frontiers. The three Polisario executives “sequestrated” in a non-identified place, are accused by groups of drug traffickers from Mali and Nigeria for wanting to pinch a loot of drugs estimated at one ton of Haschich and cocaine. According to some information collected in Tombouctou (North of Mali), the intervention of some elements from the Polisario has badly ended, because at their arrival they were received with open fire by Malian and Nigerian drug traffickers armed to the teeth. The exchange of fire between the two camps, according to a local executive, has ended with four persons killed and many injured ones.
The battle continued again on Monday “at the frontiers between Mali and Algeria between the armed group composed of drug traffickers from Mali and Niger and the other armed group close to the Polisario Front”, has confirmed the French press agency “AFP” according to the Tombouctou Governor’s counsellor.
Polisario elements coming to liberate theirs from their kidnappers were provided with light arms and circulated in Land-Rover painted with the military green.
The killed persons, specifies the AFP naming the same sources, are Malian and Nigerian traffickers as well as from the Polisario who did not find a common ground about “the selling of a ton of drugs” and the partition of the loot.
Many elements having deserted the Polisario have been converted into traffickers among whom certain have joined the Maghrebian branch al-Qaida (AQMI) carrying out their acts in the Sahel band from Mauritania to Niger, through Mali and Algeria.
For the time being, no accuracy is available about the exact number of victims of this battle nor the place where it took place and the arrests among the members of the traffickers’ groups.
This region has also become a turntable for many kinds of traffics, among which the traffic of arms and hard and sweet drug coming through Mali and going to Libya via Niger, Chad or towards Morocco and Algeria through the South of Algeria and the Western Sahara.
