Clashes erupt after Burundi coup attempt

Heavy fighting between rival Burundian troops erupted in the capital on May 14, the day after a top general launched a coup to oust the central African nation's President Pierre Nkurunziza.

Military sources and witnesses said troops loyal to the president, who was outside the country when the coup was launched and who has been blocked from returning, were fighting off an attack against the state television and radio complex.
 
AFP reporters said the crackle of automatic weapons fire and the thump of explosions could be heard throughout the night and intensifying before dawn.
 
The streets were largely deserted by civilians as sporadic clashes could be heard in other parts of the city, while plumes of smoke were seen on the city skyline.
 
According to a pro-coup military source, the state media complex was attacked in the early hours of the morning after Burundi's armed forces chief used national radio to declare that the coup, launched by former intelligence chief Godefroid Niyombare, had failed.
 
"The national defence force calls on the mutineers to give themselves up," armed forces chief General Prime Niyongabo, a supporter of the president, said in an address on state radio.
 
However a spokesman for the anti-Nkurunziza camp, Burundi's police commissioner Venon Ndabaneze, told AFP the claim was false and that General Niyombare's supporters were in control of many facilities including Bujumbura's international airport.
 
A journalist inside the RTNB building said the complex came under attack after the loyalist broadcast, and that heavy weapons including cannons and rockets were being used.
 
The attempted coup capped weeks of deadly civil unrest sparked by the president's...