A family member confirmed to AFP on Monday that Maïga died in the morning in a clinic in Bamako, surrounded by guards.
Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga is a Malian politician and Prime Minister between December 30, 2017, and April 18, 2019.
He was the leader of the Alliance for Solidarity in Mali and previously served under the Malian government as the Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Amadou Toumani Touré from April 2011 to March 2012 coup d’état.
Maïga later became the Minister of Defence from 2013 to 2014 and was Secretary-General of the Presidency from 2016 to 2017.
The former prime minister had been held since August 2021 at the central prison in Bamako, before later being transferred in December to the Bamako clinic where he finally gave up the ghost on Monday.
He had been incarcerated after being charged with, among other things, “forgery, use of forgery and favoritism” as part of an investigation into the purchase of military equipment and the acquisition of a presidential plane in 2014 during his tenure as the minister of defense.
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The appointed prime minister in 2017, Maiga was forced to resign after the April 2019 massacre of some 160 Fulani civilians in Ogossagou in Central Mali, by alleged Dogon hunters and after a series of protests denouncing the mismanagement of the country.
After his health deterioration, doctors had requested that he got evacuated for treatment, following which his wife wrote an open letter to the Head of the Malian Junta, Colonel Assimi Goïta, on March 2nd, to that effect.
