The 33rd Parachute Commando Regiment, also known as the Red Berets, were part of President Amadou Toumani Touré's presidential guard prior to his overthrow on March 21, 2012.

[1] Tensions rose significantly a week before the counter-coup attempt, when coup leader and head of state Amadou Sanogo summoned Touré to his headquarters at Soundiata-Keita military camp in Kati.

[1] On April 30, Red Beret paratroopers raided the public radio and television building (ORTM), the Modibo Keita International Airport in Bamako, and the Kati military camp.

[6] General Director of the Gabriel Touré hospital Abdoulaye Nènè Coulibaly stated that a total fourteen people were killed and forty others were injured during the counter-coup attempt.

Survivors claimed that soldiers, police, and National Guard servicemen all tortured the Red Berets at the Kati camp.

[2] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated: At the Kati camp, 83 soldiers and soldiers, alleged perpetrators of the counter-coup, were crowded into the underground cell commonly called the “Pit”, “The Chute” or “The Hole”, in stifling heat, without light and without contact with the outside, in deplorable hygienic conditions, with two toilets overflowing with excrement and worms.

Human Rights Watch accused Sanogo's security forces of these abuses, along with conducting a campaign of intimidation against journalists, relatives of the prisoners, and others involved.

[9] On January 18, 2013, the judge presiding over the case ordered the release of twenty-nine prisoners, including twenty-six Red Berets and three civilians.

[10] On December 4, 2013, a mass grave containing the bodies of twenty-one missing Red Berets was discovered in Diago, near Kati.