Loyalist troops in Burundi have arrested at least three leaders of a failed coup against President Pierre Nkurunziza, a presidential spokesman said.
Gervais Abayeho said those arrested on Friday were two army generals, including former Defence Minister Cyrille Ndayirukiye, and a police general.
Major-General Godefroid Niyombare, who led the coup attempt, was “still on the run, his whereabouts are not known to us”, Abehayo told the Reuters news agency.
The arrests came as Nkurunziza returned to the capital Bujumbura days after the attempted coup, officials in the president’s office said, adding that he was due to address the nation on Friday,
“He is in Bujumbura in a very secure place,” an aide to the president told the AFP news agency. “He will address the nation today.”
But Burundians say they want proof that Nkurunziza is in the country, whose borders and the airport in Bujumbura had been declared closed by army officers who attempted to stage the coup.
“People say they want to hear the declaration of the president on radio or national television, in order to be sure that he is here in Burundi,” Celestine Sadiki, an NGO worker in Bujumbura, told Al Jazeera.