4 DR Congo policemen sentenced to death for activist murder
KINSHASA (AFP) - A Democratic Republic of Congo military court sentenced to death Thursday four policemen, including deputy special services chief, for the killing last year of a leading rights activist.
Another police officer was sent to jail for life for complicity in the June 2010 murder of Floribert Chebeya and three others were acquitted, an AFP journalist in the court said.
Three of those sentenced to death are currently on the run.
Chebeya, founder and director of the rights group la Voix des Sans Voix (Voice of the Voiceless), was found dead in the back of his car on June 2 last year on a road near Kinshasa. His wrists bore the traces of handcuffs.
A day earlier the 47-year-old had gone to police headquarters in Kinshasa for a meeting with the national police chief Inspector General John Numbi.
The activist's driver Fidele Bazana, who accompanied him, has disappeared.
Among those sentenced to death was Colonel Daniel Mukalay, deputy head of the police special service who had reportedly confessed to a role in the murder of Chebeya.
Mukalay was the "intellectual author" of the assassination and directed the operation, court president Colonel Camille Masungi said during the reading of the judgement, which took four hours.
The three others sentenced to death were the actual killers, the court said. They were sentenced in absentia and are still on the run.
They include Lieutenant Colonel Christian Ngoy, head of the elite Simba battalion and a martial arts expert. The others were his bodyguard and a police protocol chief.
Chebeya's death sparked outrage from national and international rights campaigners as well as from the United Nations, United States and European Union.
The death penalty can be ordered by courts in the Democratic Republic of Congo but it has not been carried out since President Joseph Kabila took power in 2001.
The trial opened in November last year at the Makala central prison.
Chebeya's body was found with his trousers down, with condoms and traces of a woman's false nails and hair in the car. Relatives and fellow rights activists say the items were planted.
An autopsy carried out by a Dutch coroner said he died of heart failure after having been subjected to abuse, noting that the wounds inflicted on him were not substantial enough to have caused his death.
Activists have been calling in vain for the arrest of Numbi, who has been suspended from his post.
Appearing as a witness in the trial, Numbi has told the court he had never arranged a meeting with Chebeya.
The dead activist's widow, however, said she received a text message from her husband about the meeting with the police chief shortly before it had been due to take place.
An official in the neighbourhood where the body was discovered said residents reported having seen two police jeeps and Chebeya's car arrive at 5:00 am on the day he was found dead, before the jeeps abandoned the scene.
A witness who visited police headquarters on the same day Chebeya's meeting was supposed to have taken place, said he saw him near Mukalay's office around 8:00 pm.
Chebeya founded VSV in 1983 and campaigned against injustice, the absence of civil liberties and the persecution of opposition figures under the dictatorship of the late Mobutu Sese Seko.
After his death, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised Chebeya as a "champion of human rights", and demanded a transparent inquiry into his death.
© 2011 AFP