Senegalese police are investigating a video circulating since Tuesday on social networks showing a man being manhandled by a crowd who hurled homophobic insults at him, a police official said on Wednesday.
This case comes amid controversy surrounding Paris Saint-Germain football player and Senegalese international Idrissa Gana Gueye, accused of refusing to join the fight against homophobia by wearing a rainbow jersey during a a game in France.
Criticized in France, Idrissa Gana Gueye received a flood of support in Senegal, including that of President Macky Sall on Tuesday.
On several videos broadcast since Tuesday evening on Youtube and TikTok, an angry crowd of several dozen men surrounds in a street in broad daylight a young man barefoot and dressed simply in underpants.
The crowd shouts “homosexuality will not be accepted in Senegal”. He is held firmly at the wrists, a trickle of blood on his shoulders, and receives slaps on the back and the head.
“Dirty homosexual, with all these women within your reach, you decide to have a partner. Let us kill him before the police arrive,” we hear in Wolof on one of the videos.
On one of the videos, a crowd uttering the same insults is gathered in front of a police station in the HLM district, in the center of the capital Dakar.
A police officer from the police station confirmed on Wednesday on condition of anonymity to AFP journalists on the spot that the young man had been brought there the day before.
No information was given on his fate.
A digital investigation shows that the videos, viewed several thousand times, are recent, without being able to establish the source.
Fallou, who works nearby and witnessed the incident, told AFP that the events had started in the neighborhood market. “The people who were driving him (escorting him, editor’s note) were beating him”. “His body was bloody,” he said.
“While he was beaten, he neither shouted nor spoke,” continued this witness, saying he believed the young man was a foreigner.
He added that he had repeatedly called the police station to intervene, to no avail. “We then protected him with three other people to bring him to the police. People said he was taken for a homosexual because he was wearing a graft (a wig, editor’s note) and women’s clothes “. “We didn’t want him killed,” he added.
A second witness, interviewed by AFP on condition of anonymity, described a crowd of “a hundred people” who led the young man to the police station.
He was “bloody with head and foot injuries,” he said.
“They say he is a homosexual”, but “I don’t think he (it) is”, affirmed this witness. “He is obviously a foreigner,” he said, adding that foreign women came to pick him up by taxi at the police station, from where they left with him.
A police official, also speaking on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the case, indicated that investigations were underway.
In this 95% Muslim and very practicing country, homosexuality is widely considered deviant. The law punishes with a prison sentence of one to five years the so-called acts “against nature with an individual of his sex”.
Homosexuals complain of an increase in attacks and homophobic remarks in recent years. They indicate that a number have left the country to escape discrimination.