President Azali Assoumani makes his first appearance since being stabbed.

The President of the Union of Comoros, Azali Assoumani, chaired the Council of Ministers on Thursday, September 19, making his first appearance since the knife attack he suffered almost a week ago, in video images provided by the general secretariat of the government.

In these images, Mr Azali Assoumani appears dressed in a suit, with the left side of his forehead covered with a thick bandage. We see him getting into his car, then smiling, greeting his advisers and ministers one by one, and finally sitting at the end of the council table and rummaging through his files. Journalists from Agence France-Presse (AFP) saw the presidential convoy enter the presidency, but the press was not allowed to enter.

Assoumani, 65, had not been seen since September 13, when, according to the presidency, he was “slightly injured with a stab wound” by a young soldier, while attending the funeral of a notable religious figure, in Salimani-Itsandra, a small village overlooking Moroni. No images of him have circulated since then.

Authorities said he was fine, but his unusual absence 48 hours after the attack from the Mawlid celebrations in Moroni, an important event in this small archipelago in the Indian Ocean, almost all of whose 870,000 inhabitants profess Islam, had raised questions.

affected scalp

One of his advisers and a diplomat also told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that the Comorian president had cancelled his participation in the United Nations General Assembly, which opens on September 22 in New York, an event he rarely misses.

“I can assure you that he is in very good physical and mental health. It is the bandage on his head that is bothering him. (…) aesthetically »“This is a very special day for the president,” Msaïdié Houmed, political adviser to the president, told AFP on Wednesday when asked about the reasons for his absence. “It’s the same Azali [Assoumani] that we had before” that he is a victim of this attack, he said. The authorities refused “in the name of medical confidentiality” to reveal the nature or extent of the president’s injuries.

But Energy Minister Aboubacar Saïd Anli, first in government protocol, had suggested to the press that he had been contacted in “scalp, an area that bleeds a lot”requiring “stitching”.

A witness to the attack, who refused to reveal his identity, told AFP: “The attacker was crazy and threw himself at the head of state”which was located on a terrace of the deceased notable’s house. “He first attacked him with a knife before hitting him”said. “Without those who intervened, I firmly believe that the head of state would not have survived” alive.

Death of the perpetrator of the attack.

The motives for the attack are unknown. The day after the attack, the Moroni prosecutor, Ali Mohamed Djounaid, announced that the perpetrator, a 24-year-old soldier, arrested immediately after the attack, had been found dead the next morning, before he could be questioned in the room where he had been held alone since his arrest. The magistrate did not reveal the place of his detention or which security service was guarding him.

Two investigations are underway, one into the assassination attempt on the president and the other into the cause of the assassin’s death, he said, adding that his body was immediately handed over to his family, apparently indicating that no autopsy had been requested by the prosecution. In accordance with Islamic rites, the assassin was buried on Saturday, a few hours after his death.

Former army chief of staff Azali Assoumani took power in 1999 following a military coup. Elected in 2002, he returned to power in 2006, before being elected again in 2016 and then re-elected in 2019 and in January.

The disputed vote in January was followed by two days of deadly protests. His detractors accuse him of growing authoritarianism at the head of this three-island archipelago, located in the middle of the Mozambique Channel, where the president of the Republic combines the hats of head of state and government. Azali Assoumani held the rotating presidency of the African Union (AU) between January 2023 and February 2024, a first for a small country and an island state.