Burundi’s former president Pierre Buyoya has died of coronavirus in France at the age of 71, APA can report on Friday.
Buyoya who later worked as a top diplomat for the African Union mediation effort in Mali and the Sahel from 2012 to the end of November of this year died on Thursday evening as he was on his way to a Paris hospital.
His health had suddenly deteriorated in recent days, prompting his transfer overnight, from Bamako, Mali to Paris on an air ambulance.
But he died shortly after arriving in France where he was being rushed to a Parisian hospital for treatment.
Buyoya who was president in Burundi from 1987 to 1993 and from 1996 to 2003 had contracted coronavirus while he was in the Malian capital where he was hospitalized for a week and put on life support.
Three years ago, Pierre Buyoya resigned as High Representative of the African Union after he was sentenced in Burundi, to life imprisonment in absentia.
He was accused of instigating the 1993 assassination of his predecessor Melchior Ndadaye.
Buyoya had dismissed it as “a political trial conducted in a scandalous manner”.
He resigned at the end of November from his position as AU Special Envoy, in a bid to “clear his name.”
ARD/cgd/fss/as/APA