Former French soldier suspected of spying arrested in Ouagadougou

It has been almost two weeks since he was arrested and held incommunicado in Ouagadougou. On August 12, police in Burkina Faso’s capital arrested Damien L., a security officer working for an Australian mining company in Burkina Faso. The official reason: a problem with his visa, which he had returned to the country on the previous day to complete a new one-month course, as Norman had done for four years.

Like a handful of French nationals working in the security sector who continue to go there despite the tense relations between Ouagadougou and Paris, this forty-year-old was being monitored by the intelligence services of the military junta of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who has been in power since his coup in September 2022. In their eyes, his profile is not trivial. Between 2002 and 2007, he spent five years in the second^H Foreign Parachute Regiment (REP) of Calvi, in Corsica, from which he left with the rank of corporal.

So, a former legionnaire, he then turned, like many of his former brothers in arms, to private security. After several decades in different countries (Haiti, Iraq, Venezuela, etc.), Damien L. started as a security consultant in the mining sector in Burkina Faso in 2020. But during his last visit, he was quickly recruited by agents of the state. The Directorate of State Security (DSE). And his room at the Lancaster Hotel, the luxurious establishment where he is staying while on assignment in Ouagadougou – also frequented by Russian paramilitaries deployed in the country – is being searched.

The same applies to his phones and personal computer. It is not surprising, given his duties, that investigators noticed that the former French soldier was exchanging information about the security situation in the country. However, it is enough to suspect him of espionage and prompt further investigations into his environment and his various interlocutors.

A country suffering from jihadist groups

He was taken to a villa used as a place of detention by the DSE in Ouaga 2000, the capital's fashionable district, and some Burkinabe security officials suspect he is secretly working for French intelligence services, a claim officially denied by several French sources. Joined by the worldThe Quai d'Orsay did not wish to comment on this issue.

The case of Damien L. is added to that of the four French agents of the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) arrested in early December 2023 in Ouagadougou, a very sensitive case. They are still detained in Burkina Faso, accused of espionage, and negotiations for their release have not yielded any results. Given the suspicions of the Burkinabe authorities against him, some now fear that Damien L. will be sentenced to a long prison term.

Almost two years after coming to power, Captain Ibrahim Traoré is struggling, as he promised during his coup, to restore security to his country, which has been plagued by jihadist groups since 2015. On August 24, the country witnessed one of the worst massacres in its history in Barsalogho, 150 km north of Ouagadougou, where several hundred people were killed in an attack attributed to the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM, affiliated with Al-Qaeda).

Like his fellow putschists Assimi Goita in Mali and Abdourahmane Tiani in Niger, Captain Traoré has broken with France and moved closer to Russia. He regularly denounces internal and external attempts at destabilization and imposes a repressive regime. His opponents, both civilian and military, are regularly arrested or forcibly sent to the front. Some have since disappeared. In mid-August, their superiors in Ouagadougou recalled about a dozen officers who had been forcibly sent for training in Russia nine months earlier because they were considered hostile to Mr Traoré’s regime. According to a military source, five of them were arrested upon their return.