Malian President on Wednesday has resigned and dissolved all parliament in order to avoid “bloodshed”, hours after his arrest by troops in a sudden coup that followed a months-long political impasse.
Rebel soldiers arrested and detained President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and Prime Minister Boubou Cisse on Tuesday afternoon, August 18, and drove the duo to a military base in the town of Kati, near the capital Bamako, which they had seized that morning.
Happy and Jubilant crowds which gathered in the city centre to demand Keita’s resignation, cheered the rebels as they made their way to the 75-year-old’s official residence
However, After midnight, Keita appeared calm as he appeared in a state television broadcast to declare the dissolution of the government and national assembly, and said he had no choice but to resign with immediate effect.
“If it pleased certain elements of our military to decide this should end with their intervention, do I really have a choice?” he said of the day’s events.
“(I must) submit to it, because I don’t want any bloodshed.”
However, it was uncertain whether Keita was still in custody at the Kati base, which in a twist of fate was also the site of the 2012 putsch that brought him to power.
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