NEIL MUNSHI| West Africa Correspondent
THE MALIAN military has ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who announced his resignation early Wednesday morning, deepening the crisis in the west African country at the heart of the fight against jihadism in the Sahel.
“If elements of the army felt compelled to intervene to bring an end to this — do I really have a choice?”
Mr Keita said in a nationally televised address announcing the dissolution of parliament and his government hours after mutineering soldiers arrested him at gunpoint.
“I don’t want a single drop of blood to be shed to keep me in power.”
Mr Keita, widely known as IBK, had been the target of weeks of mass street protests against what critics say has been seven years of corrupt, inept, neglectful rule, before a group of soldiers detained him and other senior government and military officials on Tuesday.
The military junta
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