Hollande’s camel eaten for dinner; Mali promises replacement

Malian authorities will give French President Francois Hollande another camel after the one they gave him earlier was killed and eaten by the family he left it with in Timbuktu, officials in Mali said.

Embarrassed Malian authorities said on Tuesday that the replacement camel would this time be delivered to him in France.

A grateful Mali gave a baby camel to Hollande during a triumphant visit to Mali in early February, after French troops intervened to drive back Islamist rebels who had seized the north of the country.

The French president, who was traveling in the West African country with his defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, joked then that he could use the camel in Paris to get around traffic jams. But in the end, Hollande left his camel in the care of a family in Timbuktu.

The family, evidently misunderstanding the purpose of the custody arrangement, proceeded to slaughter the camel and feast on it. According to local reports, it was fashioned into a tasty tagine, a regional type of slow-simmered stew.

''As soon as we heard of this, we quickly replaced it with a bigger and better-looking camel,'' an official in Timbuktu told the Reuters news agency.

''We are ashamed of what happened to the camel,'' said the official, who asked Reuters not to identify him because he was not authorised to speak to the news media. ''The new camel will be sent to Paris. It was a present that did not deserve this fate.''

France's defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was tasked with giving Hollande regular updates on the camel's status and had to inform him of its death last week.

''The news came in from soldiers on the ground,'' a French government official said.