Who are the armed men in civilian clothes seen with police in Senegal protests?

“On this recording, you can see a man armed with a military weapon. He knows what he is doing, he knows how to use his weapon. You can see that he isn’t there to protest.” These were the words of the Senegalese head of police Mohamadou Gueye to the press as he showed them videos filmed during recent protests at a press conference held on June 4. The footage shows a man wearing a red jersey with a white “9” on it, firing at a target off-screen. Another man, also in civilian clothes, throws a projectile in the same direction.

This is proof, according to Senegalese police, that these protests in support of opposition figure Ousmane Sonko were infiltrated by people “accustomed” to using military-grade weapons.

Deadly protests broke out at the end of last week after Sonko, the leader of the PASTEF party, was sentenced on June 1 to two years in prison for “corrupting youth”. Sonko has already announced his bid for president in 2024, which he obviously couldn’t do if he is in prison. Protests in support of him quickly turned deadly, killing 16 and injuring 350, according to the Red Cross. 

Senegalese police blamed the clashes on “violent protesters who aren’t trying to express their opinion but are engaged in subversive activities”, in the words of the head of Public Safety Ibrahima Diop during the press conference on June 4. 

During the same conference, the police showed excerpts from three videos showing what they said were armed men amongst the protesters. Police Chief Gueye that these men came to “cause damage”. 

“They will shoot at civilians and then blame the security forces,” Gueye alleged. 

However, two of the clips shown by police at the press conference show something else. In the longer versions of the videos, which were widely circulated on social media, you can see these men in civilian gear, bearing arms, interacting with and seemingly working alongside armed police. 

 A man ‘face to face with security forces’ spotted in the back of a police pick-up 

Let’s start by looking at the example of the man wearing a red jacket marked with the number nine. The video shown by Senegalese police (at 7:53) stops after showing the individual firing his weapon and then running into a small street. However, a longer version does exist. In this version, taken from a series of stories published by a user of the Snapchat app, you can see the man in the red jersey in a white pickup, being driven by a man in a striped tee-shirt. He is riding alongside four other men wearing riot gear labelled “police”. 

Another video, widely shared on social media, also shows this man in red, followed by the white pick-up, just a few metres behind him. The four officers aren’t trying to arrest him and don’t react when he fires his weapon.

However, during the press conference, Police Commissioner Mohamadou Gueye insisted that the man in the red jersey was “facing off with the security forces”. The footage of the same man alongside police had been removed in the edited version shown to journalists. 

Another armed individual alongside security forces 

The same goes for the second video, which Gueye claimed shows “a person carrying an automatic pistol” (at 7:14). The man, wearing civilian clothes including a distinctive white bandana, has his back against a wall. Next to him is another man, also wearing civilian clothes but carrying a riot helmet.

The commissioner said:

If you look closely, you’ll see that he isn’t used to carrying this weapon. You can tell by the way he is shooting it. That could result in an accident that could hurt both himself or others. It’s really dangerous to protesters.

However, this video clip is just an excerpt.  The full version of the video, published on June 3, includes a wide shot that lasts about two seconds. That crucial shot shows the armed man standing just a few metres away from two men in police uniforms.

These officers aren’t making the slightest move to stop the armed man, even though his weapon is visible. The fact that the two officers are looking in the same direction as the armed civilians and the positions they are maintaining would indicate that they are surveilling the right part of the street and acting in a coordinated fashion. The riot helmet visible in the images – which has both a visor and an element to protect someone’s neck – is very similar to those used by police. 

The spokesperson for the Senegalese ministry of the interior supports the police version of events 

The FRANCE 24 Observers team contacted the spokesperson for the Senegalese Minister of the Interior Maham Ka. We provided Ka with our findings, but he still supported the version of events presented by police during the June 4 press conference. 

“What’s important for us is that what the police say is truthful,” he said: 

If the police say that they were confronted with armed people on the ground who did not come to protest and that they published video to support their statements, then, for us, this is the truth.

So how does Ka explain the presence of individuals in plain clothes alongside the police in two of these videos? Ka says that the people wearing anti-riot helmets and police vests may not be part of the security forces.  

Seeing people in police uniform in these videos is not proof that they are members of the police. In fact, it is something we’ve seen in the past in Senegal. I don’t want to go into detail, because investigations are underway. But if the police showed this footage to the press, then what’s certain is that these people are not police

In the full version of the second video showing the man in the red jersey, you can see someone in a police uniform opening fire with what looks like a riot gun. Our team contacted a Twitter account specialised in arms called “Calibre Obscura”. They explained that the shape of the weapon and the way it was shooting make them believe it is a Cougar launcher, designed by the French firm Alsetex for use by security forces in crowd control situations.

Who are the men who appear alongside the security forces?

There are a number of publications on social media that accuse these armed men in civilian gear of being “nervis”, a term for young men hired by political parties to shut down protests by force. There have been documented cases of these men – usually wearing civilian gear and moving around in a pickup – in Senegal in the past during different moments of social tension, especially back in 2021.

Dozens of videos showing convoys of white four-door pickups, carrying men in civilian clothes, sometimes armed with batons, have been circulating on TikTok and Facebook (examples here, here and here): the models shown in these images resemble the pickup that appears in the videos of the man wearing the red number 9 jersey. 

We spoke to a young man, who wanted to remain anonymous, who said that he saw, on June 3, a convoy of this type in his neighbourhood, Parcelles Assainies: 

There were eight pickups: seven white ones and one dark one. Inside, there were men in uniform that looked like a police intervention brigade.

There were people in the back of the white pickups. Some had sticks on the truck bed. Most of the people looked young.  

This young man, who says that he is “politically, more pro-government” is convinced that he encountered “nervis”. 

But where do these white pickups come from? Several Facebook posts say that a large number of vehicles of this type were visible in front of the headquarters of the political party that President Macky Sall belongs to – l’Alliance pour la République (Alliance for the Republic, or APR). The information was also confirmed by RFI in Dakar. 

Pape Mahawa Diouf, an official from the ruling coalition, said that the presence of these vehicles was not strange. 

There are all kinds of vehicles in front of the headquarters, especially those belonging to party supporters, who gathered there during the protests. We hold conferences there, people gather there.

I don’t think that the supporters participated in the protests. I don’t know about any of this.

It’s hard for the time being to establish clear links between the security forces and these young “nervis”. However, while violence from the protesters did indeed occur during protests, the videos shown as “proof” during the press conference on Sunday, June 4 seem to actually show the presence of armed men in civilian clothes alongside police.