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Guinean troops deployed after deadly ethnic clashes | |
(about 14 hours later) | |
Security forces have been deployed in the south-east of Guinea after at least 54 people died in ethnic clashes. | |
A curfew is already in place in the second-biggest city, N'Zerekore. | |
The fighting spread from a nearby town where guards from the Guerze tribe beat to death a rival ethnic Konianke youth they had accused of stealing. | |
Witnesses said some of the victims who died in the three days of violence were hacked to death with machetes or burned alive. | |
Authorities had initially put the death toll at 12 but the figure rose sharply as bodies were collected from the streets of N'Zerekore on Wednesday. | |
Around 130 people were said to have been injured in the clashes. | |
Government spokesman Damantang Albert Camara told the Reuters news agency calm had been restored and about 50 people arrested. | |
Earlier reports said sporadic violence was continuing in surrounding rural areas. | |
Guinea has a long history of ethnic tension between the two groups, with clashes regularly breaking out over religious and other grievances. | |
The Guerze are mostly Christian or animist, while the Konianke are Muslims considered to be close to neighbouring Liberia's Mandingo ethnic community. | The Guerze are mostly Christian or animist, while the Konianke are Muslims considered to be close to neighbouring Liberia's Mandingo ethnic community. |
The latest violence first erupted on Monday in the village of Koule before spreading to nearby N'Zerekore, some 570km (350 miles) south-east of the capital, Conakry. | |
The army imposed a curfew in the city of about 300,000 to try to restore calm. | |
On Tuesday, President Alpha Conde made a televised appeal for calm and called for unity in the run-up to long-delayed elections due in September. | |
"The town of N'Zerekore has witnessed events resulting in a loss of human life, several wounded and damage to property. Faced with this situation, I call on the population for calm," he said in the national address. |