Serge Oulon

Atiana Serge Oulon is a Burkinabé journalist and director of L'Événement, a bimonthly investigative newspaper. In June 2024, he was among three journalists abducted by gunmen in separate incidents in Burkina Faso.

Career Oulon was born and raised in Ouagadougou. After working as a journalist for Courrier confidentiel and Radio Liberté, in 2019 he joined L'Événement as its director.

In December 2022, Oulon published an article reporting that Prospère Boena, an army captain in the Centre Nord Region, had allegedly embezzled 400 million F.CFAs from the budget of the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, an auxiliary force that supported the Burkina Faso Armed Forces. Boena was an associate of the interim President of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, who in February 2023 stated that Oulon had either lacked "the right information" or otherwise was acting in "bad faith", and accused him of fostering a "climate of mistrust" between soldiers and volunteers.

In June 2024, Oulon published an additional article about the case, in which he noted that a key witness in the embezzlement case against Boena had died. As a result of the article, Burkina Faso's media regulator, the Superior Council for Communication, suspended L'Événement for a month starting from 20 June. The Media Foundation of West Africa expressed its "deep outrage" at news of Oulon's abduction.