Ten police killed in Burkina Faso attack

• Suspected jihadists kill about 10 police officers in an attack in northern Burkina Faso.
• Security forces routed assailants in a counter-attack and are now combing the area.
• Latest in a string of bloody assaults in the landlocked Sahel state.

Security sources claimed on Friday that suspected jihadists killed roughly ten police officers in an attack in northern Burkina Faso near the Niger border overnight.

“An outlying gendarmerie post in Seytenga in Seno province was targeted by terrorists last night,” a source said.

“About 10 gendarmes (died), four were wounded and there was major material damage,” the source said, adding that the toll was provisional.

Read more: Gold mine in northern Burkina Faso attacked, two dead

Another security source confirmed the attack, the latest in a string of bloody assaults in the landlocked Sahel state.

The source added that the security forces had routed the assailants in a counter-attack and were now combing the area.

“Several (men) were still missing” as of Friday morning, the second source said.

One of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso has been gripped by a nearly seven-year-old insurgency launched by jihadists crossing from neighboring Mali.

More than 2,000 people have died and some 1.8 million people have fled their homes.

Attacks have been concentrated in the north and east of the country.

The nation has been under military rule since January, when colonels angered at failures to roll back the insurgency ousted the elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore.

After a relative lull, jihadist attacks resumed, inflicting a toll of more than 200 civilian and military dead over the past three months.

Four gendarmes were slain in an attack on Thursday in Barani, in the northwest, according to the army, while a soldier and a civilian were killed in an unidentified man’s raid on a gold mine near Ouahigouya, in the north.

Read more: Two die in new Burkina Faso attack