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 organise 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 Reuters.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.
