Mass grave in Guinea: a group appeals to the UN for an "independent international investigation"

An opposition group in Guinea announced on Wednesday that it had appealed to the UN to take action with the country's authorities for "an independent international investigation" into the six bodies found in a mass grave.

The National Front for the Defense of Democracy (FNDD), a collective of parties, unions and NGOs, wrote on Wednesday to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, following the discovery on August 24 of the bodies of six men in a forest in the southwest of the country.

The bodies, bound and blindfolded, were found by young people collecting wood in the Allassoyah area, Forécariah prefecture in Lower Guinea, according to local sources.

The FNDD asked Mr. Türk to "immediately contact" the specialized UN bodies for "urgent communication with the Guinean authorities" regarding this matter, according to the letter from the collective signed by its lawyers, William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth.

Among these United Nations bodies, they cite the Working Group on Enforced Executions and the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions.

The group is appealing to the UN to "urge the Guinean authorities to ensure that the investigation opened by the Forécariah prosecutor's office is conducted with the assistance of independent forensic experts, including international ones, and that its conclusions are made public."

The "silence" of the Guinean authorities "fuels legitimate suspicions as to (their) real willingness to shed full light on these events," he says.

Since General Mamadi Doumbouya came to power -- by a coup in 2021, then elected president at the end of 2025 -- political parties have been suspended, demonstrations have been repressed and many opposition and civil society leaders have been arrested, convicted or forced into exile.

Cases of abductions and enforced disappearances of dissenting voices and their relatives have increased in recent years in Guinea. The authorities have consistently denied any knowledge of them.