An 83-year-old American nun was kidnapped in a single day within the troubled north of Burkina Faso, her diocese stated Tuesday.
"In a single day Monday to Tuesday, unidentified armed males went to the neighborhood of nuns at Yalgo parish in Kaya diocese. They kidnapped Sister Suellen Tennyson from the Congregation of Marianites of the Holy Cross," it stated in a press release.
Northern Burkina Faso is a flashpoint for assaults by Islamist insurgents who began making bloody cross-border raids from neighbouring Mali in 2015.
Their marketing campaign has claimed some 2,000 lives and displaced some 1.8 million individuals.
"Suellen Tennyson was taken away to an unknown vacation spot by her kidnappers who earlier than leaving vandalized rooms and sabotaged the neighborhood's automobile, which they tried to drive off," the diocese of Kaya added in its assertion.
Tennyson had been in service at Yalgo since 2014, stated the assertion, which was signed by the bishop of Kaya, Theophile Nare.
The State Division stated in a press release that it's "conscious of studies of a U.S. citizen lacking in Burkina Faso," including that it's working to verify the studies and is monitoring the scenario.
One of many poorest international locations on this planet, Burkina Faso has been dominated by a navy junta since January. Mutinous colonels seized energy as anger mounted over the failure of the nation's elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, to roll again the insurgency.
Kabore's successor, Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, has declared safety to be a precedence. However a surge of assaults up to now two weeks has claimed about 80 lives, each civilian and navy.
In April 2021, three Europeans who had been reported lacking after an assault in japanese Burkina — two Spaniards and an Irishman — have been "executed by terrorists," authorities stated on the time.