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| - A court in Senegal's capital Dakar on Thursday acquitted three Mauritanian nationals who were suspected of involvement in two deadly jihadist attacks in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast in 2016. As part of a rare slew of cases against alleged Islamist extremists in the West African state, the court also sentenced a French national on charges of supporting terrorism. Prosecutors accused the Mauritanian men, who have been in detention since 2016, of communicating with Malian national Mimi Ould Baba Cheikh, one of the alleged masterminds of the 2016 attacks in Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. Radical Islamists attacked a café and the Splendid Hotel in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou that year, leaving 30 people dead, around half of them foreigners. Nineteen people, including Westerners, were also killed at the tourist resort of Grand-Bassam near the Ivorian capital Abidjan in 2016. Mimi Ould Baba Ould Cheikh, who is currently in detention in Mali, has been charged in connection with both attacks in the United States. The three Mauritanian men claimed innocence, however, and the Dakar special criminal court dismissed the charges against them. In a separate judgement, the court sentenced French national Mamadou Diaou, 22, to five years in prison on charges of advocating terrorism. Police arrested Diaou in August 2016 as he stepped off a plane in Senegal, after a security database flagged him. He has been in detention since then. Pleading innocence, Diaou said that he travelled to Senegal as a tourist. But security officials searched his phone and discovered a farewell message left to his parents describing how he was leaving to become a jihadist. The court also sentenced a Senegalese woman who fought for the Islamic State group in Libya to five years in prison. She has already been detained for over five years. Senegal has so far been spared jihadist attacks, which are common in its surrounding region. Much of the central Sahel -- comprising Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger -- is engulfed in a brutal Islamist insurgency which has killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. mrb/siu/eml/tgb
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