France drops 'massacre' rap
2007-06-20 22:36
Versailles - A French court formally dropped a probe on Wednesday targeting Congo's national police chief on charges of crimes against humanity over the presumed massacre of more than 350 refugees in 1999, a court official said.
Scores of Congolese, returning from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo where they had fled civil war, were arrested in May 1999 at the river port of Brazzaville Beach on suspicion of backing an anti-government militia.
According to rights groups and relatives of the missing, 353 people "disappeared", having apparently been tortured and executed by President Denis Sassou Nguesso's authorities.
The appeals court near Paris confirmed that Congo's police chief General Jean-Francois Ndengue, who was briefly jailed in France in 2004 as part of a probe into the deaths, was diplomatically immune from prosecution.
The French probe targeting Ndengue was quashed in 2004 on grounds of diplomatic immunity, but France's highest court in January overturned the decision - sparking an angry reaction from Sassou Nguesso who accused France of interfering in his country's affairs.
The decision to revive the French probe followed the acquittal of 15 accused, all of them top-ranking military and police officials, in a 2005 trial in Brazzaville dismissed by rights groups as a farce.
The French investigation was made possible because one of the accused was resident in the country.