Former Burkina Faso President Compaoré Found Guilty for Thomas Sankara’s Murder, Given Life Sentence

Burkina Faso’s former President Blaise Compaoré was on Wednesday found guilty for the murder of his charismatic predecessor and close friend, Thomas Sankara.

A military tribunal in absentia sentenced him to life imprisonment for complicity in the 1987 murder, attack on state security and concealment of a corpse.

The duo who was close friends jointly seized power in 1983.

Four years after the putsch, Sankara, 37, was gunned down along with 12 others in the West African nation’s capital Ouagadougou during the coup d’état that brought Compaoré to power.

Sankara, the Marxist revolutionary remains a hero for many across Africa because of his anti-imperialist stance and austere lifestyle.

In 2019, a six-metre (16ft) statue of him was erected in Ouagadougou.

At just 33, the Marxist revolutionary campaigned against corruption, post-colonial influences, denouncing foreign aid as a control mechanism and oversaw huge increases in education and health spending.

He rolled out mass vaccination against polio, banned female circumcision and polygamy, and was one of the first African leaders to publicly recognise the growing AIDS epidemic as a threat for the continent.

A former fighter pilot, Sankara won public support in the impoverished nation by selling a government fleet of Mercedes, lowering the pay of well-off public servants and forbidding first class state travel.

He cut his own salary, refused to work with air conditioning and jogged through Ouagadougou unaccompanied.

Critics, however, said his reforms curtailed freedoms and did little to enrich ordinary people. They also pointed to alleged human rights abuses against his opponents.

Eleven others were also found guilty, including Gilbert Diendere and Compaoré’s security chief Haycinthe Kafando, who was accused of leading the hit squad that killed Sankara.