Captain Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara

Those skills were on display on 8 April when a court in Ouagadougou convicted former military ruler Blaise Compaoré in absentia for his role in the 1987 assassination of the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara (AC Vol 62 No 10 Sankara's ghost)...

This has helped to reassure Ecowas and has allowed the resumption on solid legal grounds of the trial of those accused of killing President Thomas Sankara in 1987...

The revolutionary Capt Thomas Sankara staged his coup in 1983 and Compaoré took power for himself four years later...

He praised Thomas Sankara – the assassinated Burkinabè president who is celebrated as a hero throughout the continent – and told the students 'I am from a generation that doesn't come to tell Africans what to do...

On 13 April the Justice Militaire indicted Compaoré for involvement in the murder of his predecessor the ever-popular Thomas Sankara...

He has an arrest warrant pending for alleged involvement in the murder of his widely revered predecessor Thomas Sankara in 1987 and questions remain about the 10 people killed during attempts to suppress the demonstrations that led to Compaoré's ouster (AC Vol 46 No 24 Five years)...

The President made headline news with his exchanges with the students – only partly scripted – announcing that he would remove the secret classification on all documents on the murder of Thomas Sankara the man in power 31 years ago when François Mitterrand visited Burkina Faso the last French head of state to do so...

Just before Compaoré turned against Captain Thomas Sankara Diallo also saw which way the wind was blowing and backed the 1987 coup that killed the charismatic soldier...

Boukary Kaboré a retired lieutenant colonel nicknamed 'The Lion' (he took part in Thomas Sankara's 1983 coup) ran into resistance from a local group of hunters known as dozos armed with home-made guns...

A sequence of events that illustrates this concerns the arrest warrants for 17 individuals including Compaoré on suspicion of complicity in the murder of his predecessor Thomas Sankara after the October 1987 coup...