A video of the abuses presumably committed by Blue helmets the journalists from Agence France-Presse reporting from the Central African Republic (CAR) have noticed circulating since May 2018

Several elements allow the experts to affirm that this scene did not take place in January 2019 in the village of Ippy, but on April 3, 2018 in the village of Tagbara, on the road between Bambari and Ippy.

At that time, “anti-Balaka” militias, self-proclaimed self-defense armed groups, targeted a temporary peacekeeper base in Tagbara.

MINUSCA spokesman Vladimir Monteiro confirms to AFP that this video is indeed related to Tagbara: “We saw and analyzed the content of the video as part of an internal investigation process following the attack of 3 April 2018 against a temporary operation base of MINUSCA in Tagbara, in Ouaka Prefecture. During this attack by 200-300 armed anti-Balaka members, a Mauritanian peacekeeper was killed and 11 wounded. The MINUSCA peacekeepers fought back and 22 anti-Balaka were killed, “he told AFP.

According to the AFP dispatch reporting on the incident, the MINUSCA said at the time that it had discovered, “apart from this attack” and in addition to the 22 anti-Balaka killed, the dead bodies of 21 civilians near a church in Tagbara. . That is 43 deaths in total.

Some of them appear in this video. They also appear in a UN document that AFP procured and in which several photos show Tagbara and his victims shortly after the attack.

The metadata in this PDF document indicates that it was created on April 3 at 3:08 PM – the same day as the Tagbara attack occurred at 5:00 AM It contains many photos of the village after the attack. On one of them, one can see the same bodies as in the video, frozen in the same postures and in the same clothes.

On the sixth shot, visible below, many visual elements can also confirm that the Tagbara attack is the one whose consequences are visible in the video circulating on social networks.

At the sixty-first second, we notice indeed that the roof of the church presents on the video sags in its center – and that its curvature is exactly identical to that of the church of Tagbara below in photo. Two seconds later, one clearly sees the same trees, and the same small straw-roofed construction opposite the church.