Guinea - Government Security Forces Clash With Protesters

Guinea security forces used guns, teargas and truncheons on Thursday to scatter protesters angered by the government's handling of upcoming parliamentary elections, witnesses said.

The government said later in the day that 17 members of the security forces had been injured and, amid rumours of further protests planned for Friday, banned all demonstrations.

Tensions have been rising in the West African country between the administration of President Alpha Conde and the opposition, which has accused him of attempting to consolidate power by pre-rigging the polls in his favour.

Wrangling over how to organize the vote has caused the date of the poll, initially meant to come on the heels of Conde's election in late 2010, to backslide repeatedly.

"The CENI (independent national electoral commission) is corrupt," Kerfalla Sylla, one of the protesters in the capital Conakry, said.

Witnesses said more than two thousand people had joined the protest - the first of several planned by the opposition - before police charged it, and that at least two people were injured with live rounds.

"I was running and I saw an old man struggling with a soldier who was holding a weapon to him. I wanted to fight the soldier and he shot me, the bullet hit me in the foot," protester Mamadou Aliou Diallo told reporters.

Another protester said he saw a man shot in the back during the clashes, in which some demonstrators lobbed chunks of concrete at the police.

A government spokesman said that the demonstration had been authorized, but that police were forced to intervene after the protesters became unruly. He gave no details on injuries.

Speaking on state television on Thursday evening, Alhassane Conde, minister of territorial administration, cited the injuries and other violence as a reason to ban further protests.

"I call on the security forces to ready themselves. Anyone who decides to protest without authorization will bear the full force of the law and the state," he said.

Conde last month scrapped a July 8 election date to give officials more time to fix problems in the voter registration system, a move welcomed by opposition parties.

But opposition figures also have demanded that electoral body officials resign and be replaced over concerns that they are biased in Conde's favour.

The standoff has heightened tensions in the coup-plagued nation and rekindled divisions between the country's two most populous ethnicities, the Malinke and the Peul.

Conde, a Malinke, narrowly defeated Peul candidate Cellou Dalein Diallo in the 2010 polls.

The European Union, which cut off aid programmes in Guinea after a 2008 coup, has said it will only resume full cooperation in the country after the parliamentary polls.

Guinea is the world's top supplier of the aluminum ore bauxite and its iron ore riches have drawn billions of dollars in planned new investments from companies like Rio Tinto and Vale.