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Gabonese doctor with 'damning report' on poll unrest arrested

By AFP
Africa Smoke rises from a barricade as Gabonese police officers patrol from a pick up in Libreville on September 2, 2016.  By Marco Longari AFPFile
OCT 10, 2016 LISTEN
Smoke rises from a barricade as Gabonese police officers patrol from a pick up in Libreville on September 2, 2016. By Marco Longari (AFP/File)

Libreville (AFP) - A Gabonese doctor who compiled a "damning report" on the post-electoral violence that rocked the oil-rich central African nation has been arrested, a civil society group said on Sunday.

Sylvie Nkoghe-Mbot, 56, a paediatrician and the head of an NGO named Hippocrate was arrested at the end of last week, the Dynamique Unitaire civil society group said.

Violence erupted in Gabon after President Ali Bongo was declared the winner with a wafer-thin majority in the August 27 vote.

Defeated presidential candidate Jean Ping filed a legal challenge but the country's top court dismissed opposition claims of vote fraud and upheld Bongo's win.

Opposition figures say more than 50 people were killed in the violence but the government has given a toll of three dead.

Ping's French lawyer Eric Moutet said he had taken up the case of Nkoghe-Mbot, who he said was the "co-author of a damning report on the victims of the exactions of the presidential guard."

"I will take up the issue with Canadian authorities tomorrow as her children are Canadian nationals," he told AFP in a text message.

About 1,000 people had been arrested following the post-poll violence and around 70 of them are still in detention, a judicial source told AFP.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court based in The Hague has said she is opening an initial probe into the unrest.

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