[PULSE.NG] The body of a "white man with gunshot wounds" has been found in a northern region of Burkina Faso...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president is currently Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and will leave office feet first, one way or the other...
where jihadists have carried out attacks, a security official told AFP Thursday.
The body was found late on Wednesday in Siega in Soum province, "and is being taken to Dori for identification," the source said.
Last month, 34-year-old Canadian aid worker Edith Blais, was reported missing with an Italian friend, Lucas Tacchetto, 30, as they were travelling between the western town of Bobo-Dioulasso and the capital Ouagadougou.
Separately, Canadian geologist Kirk Woodman was kidnapped from a gold mine in the east of the country late on Tuesday.
His abductors were last seen heading towards neighbouring Niger, a direction that would not have taken them through Soum, officials said.
Burkina Faso lies in the heart of the vast Sahel region
... North Africa's answer to the Pak tribal areas...
, which is struggling with a bloody Islamist insurgency.
The region turned into a hotbed of violent extremism and lawlessness after chaos engulfed Libya in 2011.
An Islamist insurgency began in northern Mali, while Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...rose in northern Nigeria.
Jihadist raids began in northern Burkina Faso in 2015 before spreading to the east, near the border with Togo and Benin.
Most of the attacks have been attributed to Ansarul Islam and the Group to Support Islam and Moslems (JNIM).
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The body "is being taken to Dori for identification," the source says. Another security source says the remains will then be flown by helicopter to Ouagadougou.
Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland says her country is "appalled and deeply saddened" by the killing.
"Canada condemns those responsible for this terrible crime. We are working with the government of Burkina Faso and other international partners to pursue those responsible and bring them to justice," she says.
Woodman is one of two Canadians who have gone missing in Burkina Faso, an impoverished country in the front line of a jihadist rebellion in the Sahel.
He was vice president of a Canadian company, Progress Minerals, which owns a gold mine at Tiabangou, located in Yagha, a volatile province near the Niger and Mali border.
He was at the mine when the site came under attack from about 10 gunnies, Security Minister Clement Sawadogo said yesterday.