Gunmen snatch 83-year-old nun from bed in Burkina Faso

NEW ORLEANS (AP):

Ten gunmen kidnapped an 83-year-old American nun from her bed in the west African nation of Burkina Faso and destroyed almost everything in the house where she lived, but left four other women unhurt, a Louisiana official for the order said Wednesday.

Sister Suellen Tennyson was taken late Monday “from her room in her pajamas – no shoes, no glasses, no phone, no medicine,” Sister Ann Lacour, US congregational leader for the Marianites of Holy Cross in Covington, Louisiana, told AP. Lacour provided additional details of the kidnapping a day after the AP reported it.

Lacour said Tennyson takes blood pressure medicine and she is not sure how she would fare without it. “I do know without her glasses she’d be totally disoriented,” she said in a phone interview from the order’s worldwide headquarters in Lemans, France.

Two other nuns – one from Canada and one from Burkina Faso – and two young Burkinabè women who were living in the same house in Yalgo are now safely at the Kaya Diocese headquarters, even though the gunmen shot up their new truck so they couldn’t use it, Lacour said. Yalgo is roughly 100 kilometres (62 miles) northeast of Kaya.

Lacour said she believes Tennyson was taken because she’s American, but the kidnappers have not been in touch with the order. Without Tennyson’s phone, she noted, they might not have the phone numbers to do so.

“Was she targeted? We don’t really know that,” Lacour said.

Tennyson had been a missionary in Burkina Faso since 2014, supporting Sister Pauline Drouin, a nurse from Lake Magantic in Canada, and Sister Pascaline Tougma, a midwife from Burkina Faso, Lacour said.

The once peaceful West African nation has seen a great deal of violence linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group over the past six years. Activist Daouda Diallo has documented more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings by security forces and jihadis over that period.