Congolese military justice on Saturday (January 29th) pronounced 51 death sentences, a 10-year prison sentence and two acquittals in the trial of the murder of two UN experts in 2017 in Kasaï, in the center of the Democratic Republic of Congo. .

In the DRC, the death penalty is regularly pronounced, particularly in cases involving armed groups, but has not been applied since a moratorium decided in 2003, and is systematically commuted to a life sentence.

The decision of the military court of Kananga, capital of the province of Kasaï central, is close to the requisitions of the public ministry, which had requested, on November 30, 51 condemnations to the death penalty and three sentences of 20 years in prison.

However, a colonel against whom the death penalty had been requested, Jean de Dieu Mambweni, was sentenced to ten years in prison, the court having not retained against him the charges of "terrorism, association of criminals and war crime".

He was sentenced for "violation of instructions and failure to assist a person in danger".

His lawyers immediately announced their intention to appeal to the high military court in Kinshasa.

Among the two detainees who were acquitted and released was journalist Raphaël Trudon Kapuku Kamuzadi.

The court considered that the offenses charged to him were not established.

The court judgment, recorded on 146 pages and delivered after a trial of more than four years which did not answer all the questions on the assassination of the UN experts, was read for five hours by its president.

Representatives of the provincial authorities and of the UN were present, as well as the families of those sentenced to death, in tears.

Four years of trial, questions still pending   

Michael Sharp, of American nationality, and Zaida Catalan, Swedish, had disappeared on March 12, 2017, while they were in Kasaï to investigate mass graves linked to the armed conflict which had broken out in the region after the death of the customary chief Kamuina Nsapu, killed by security forces.

This conflict left 3,400 dead and tens of thousands displaced between September 2016 and mid-2017.

Their bodies were found in a village two weeks later, on March 28, 2017. The young woman had been beheaded.

According to the official version, they were executed on March 12, 2017 by militiamen of the Kamuina Nsapu sect.

But, in June 2017, a report submitted to the UN Security Council considered that this double murder was a "premeditated ambush" and did not exclude the involvement of members of state security.

During the trial, it was alleged that the Kamuina Nsapu militiamen had killed the experts in revenge on the UN, which they blamed for not preventing the army from attacking them.

But the debates did not make it possible to identify possible sponsors.

Those sentenced to death, twenty of whom are on the run and were tried in absentia, are mostly former Kamuina Nsapu militiamen, convicted of crimes of terrorism, war crimes by mutilation, murder, participation in an insurrectionary movement. .. Their lawyers did not make a statement after the judgment was announced.

The trial began on June 5, 2017, but experienced several interruptions.

At least two defendants died in detention and, faced with the slowness of military justice, a UN mechanism was set up by the Security Council to support the procedure.

With AFP

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