Buhari condemns coup in Burkina Faso

But at a press conference, Benin President Thomas Boni Yayi did not give any details on a potential deal, instead saying only that a “good decision” would be announced Sunday.

“All the players will come together tomorrow morning to issue the good news to the whole world”, Boni Yayi said after talks Saturday in which he and fellow mediator Macky Sall, the Senegalese president, spoke to those on both sides of this week’s coup.

The country’s interim president Michel Kafando and prime minister Isaac Zida were arrested at the presidency on Wednesday evening.

In Burkina Faso it is reported that three people have died and at least 13 have been injured at the main hospital in Ouagadougou.

Late Friday night, after a full day of meetings, Sall noted that the rival camps had shown little will to negotiate.

Calling themselves the National Democratic Council, the coup leaders oppose the interim government’s plans to dissolve the presidential guard and claim the country faced instability after some candidates were barred from standing in the elections.

Young people wielding sticks and slingshots dragged railway fences into the streets of Ouagadougou to block soldiers loyal to coup leader General Gilbert Diendere, who is facing intense diplomatic pressure over Thursday’s putsch.

The coup in the former French colony was condemned by the United States and France, and the African Union suspended Burkina Faso.

Diendere, a former top Compaore aide, said he met some members of the worldwide community and was “considering meeting the different political parties very soon”.

Presidential guards burst into a Cabinet meeting at the presidential palace in the capital Ouagadougou and took the interim president, prime minister and other senior officials hostage Wednesday, and later announced that they had been removed from office.

In the face of global condemnation of the coup, Diendere on Friday insisted he was acting in the interests of the impoverished, landlocked west African country.

On Friday, RSP troops fired in the air to disperse protesters trying to march on Revolution Square, the epicentre of last year’s revolt against Compaore. The vote is supposed to mark the end of the transitional government installed after Compaore – in power since 1987 – was toppled by a popular uprising in October 2014.

“All measures taken by those who took power by force in Burkina Faso are null and void”, Uganda’s AU ambassador Mull Katende said Friday.

In the capital, amid growing calls for civil disobedience, the homes of two former Compaore allies – former Ouagadougou mayor Simon Compaore, and Salif Diallo, who had joined opposition ranks in 2014 – were ransacked overnight Friday, an Agence France-Presse reporter saw.