In a poignant story shrouded in mystery, a team of the Red Cross stumbles upon a Mauritanian citizen in a Malian prison, six years after his disappearance.
And the online newspaper Sahara Media reported that on Thursday, the Malian authorities released the Mauritanian Ibrahim Ould El-Hajj, after he had suddenly disappeared in Mali in 2016.
The newspaper reported that the Mauritanian citizen, whose tracks had been cut off for years, was found a few days ago by “a squad of the Red Cross by chance that a Mauritanian citizen is detained in the prisons of the Malian police.”
The newspaper quoted the office of the Mauritanian community in Mali, that the release came in coordination between the Mauritanian embassy in Bamako and the Malian authorities. Sources told the newspaper that Ibrahim, who was born in Atar, northern Mauritania, was working in the city of Anwara in Mali, as a street vendor for mobile phones, before the Malian authorities arrested him in “mysterious circumstances.”
The available information about the arrest of the Mauritanian citizen says that the man was wandering with his goods in 2016 near the city of Al-Nawara.
And it happened that Ibrahim entered “a reserve that he thought was a residential complex, but it belonged to the financial police, to be arrested by the latter”, and his traces were lost until a Red Cross team found him by chance in a prison of the Malian police.
According to these sources, the Red Cross informed the Mauritanian embassy of Ibrahim’s arrest, so the Mauritanian diplomatic mission, in turn, began its contacts with the security authorities in Mali, at which point the Public Prosecution referred the detainee to Camp Number One of the Malian Gendarmerie.
After this long suffering and mysterious disappearance, it is expected from one moment to another that Ibrahim will arrive in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, on a private plane secured by the Mauritanian embassy.