While neighboring West African nations mobilized to provide military support, Benin’s military was on Monday looking for fugitive troops responsible for a coup attempt that was thwarted over the weekend and resulted in multiple fatalities.
According to loyalist military sources, all hostages, including senior officers, had been freed by Monday after at least a dozen plotters were apprehended.
AFP journalists observed that by Monday afternoon, Cotonou, the nation’s commercial hub, was peaceful and traffic had resumed as usual, one day after a group of soldiers said on national television that they had overthrown the president.
President Patrice Talon made his own TV appearance late Sunday, assuring the country that the situation was “completely under control”.
Talon, 67, is due to hand over the reins of power in April after the maximum-allowed two terms leading Benin, which in recent years has been hit by jihadist violence in the north.
The Sunday coup attempt follows a spate of successful military takeovers in the region, including in Benin’s northern neighbours Niger and Burkina Faso, as well as Mali, Guinea and, last month, Guinea-Bissau.
“Violent clashes” erupted between the coup plotters and the Republican Guard at Talon’s Cotonou residence, resulting in “casualties on both sides”, according to the government.
The dead included the wife of the president’s military chief of staff General Bertin Bada.
Nigeria, Benin’s neighbor, claimed late Sunday that it has deployed troops and conducted military strikes on Cotonou in response to Benin’s demand for prompt assistance.
ECOWAS, a regional organization in West Africa, has also declared its military support for Benin; however, a Monday meeting in Abidjan was canceled. During the coup in Niger in 2023, the bloc had threatened to intervene, but in the end, nothing was done.
Although they were “not in a position to say how many” persons were involved in the coup attempt, “nor how many are currently on the run,” a military source told AFP on Monday that it was “presumed that many of them have fled” to the countryside.
“The search continues,” the source said, adding that “there have been arrests”.
Other sources told AFP there had been around a dozen arrests, but that coup leader Lieutenant Colonel Pascal Tigri was on the run.
All hostages have meanwhile been “released”, according to the military source.
Two senior Beninese officers, Chief of army staff Abou Issa and army chief Colonel Faizou Gomina, had been taken hostage but were released overnight.
