On Tuesday, a Senegalese public prosecutor asserted that a student who was slain by police, according to demonstrators, actually died after “jumping from the fourth floor.”
The west African nation has been rocked by the death of medical student Abdoulaye Ba on February 9 under mysterious circumstances when police broke up his university campus in the city, Dakar, after days of student protests.
According to the coroner’s postmortem report, a number of injuries to his skull and chest were “complicated by massive internal bleeding,” ruling out “an isolated natural cause.”
The students’ collective at the Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) insisted last week that Ba was “brutally tortured to death by the police.”
But the Dakar court’s prosecutor on Tuesday rejected that account, insisting that Ba “had not been beaten.”
The student “jumped from the fourth floor of Pavilion F and unfortunately landed on the asphalt. This explains the injuries and other damage observed by the forensic doctor on his body,” Ibrahima Ndoye told the press.
According to Ndoye, Ba was attempting to flee from a fire that had broken out in their dormitory, resulting in “flames and smoke that were causing them to suffocate.”
The prosecutor did not give details about the cause of the alleged fire, which took place during the police intervention on campus.
His previous insistence on Saturday that Ba had not been tortured prompted the UCAD students’ association to accuse the prosecutor of “stirring up confusion.”
The government has described the student’s death as a “tragedy” and admitted to “police misconduct.” But Interior Minister Mouhamadou Bamba Cisse also justified the intervention by accusing students of attempting to destroy university campus infrastructure, citing video evidence.
Footage filmed by students and shared on social media showed the violence between the security forces and students.
In some of the images, officers are seen entering university grounds and firing tear gas into buildings while students retaliated by throwing stones.
In one video authenticated by AFP, police officers are seen striking a screaming man with blunt instruments.
