'Give Kabila's killers amnesty'

2008-01-16 21:24

Kinshasa - Lawyers in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday argued that an amnesty should be applied to about 30 men tried and convicted for killing president Laurent Desire-Kabila seven years ago.

"Lawmakers should discuss this case. They legislate and need to realise that the assassination of a head of state is a political crime, and if they don't want to, we ask them for a retrial," Eley Lofele, a spokesperson for the defence team, said on the UN-sponsored Radio Okapi.

The lawyers consider that a general amnesty extended in December 2005 to all Congolese, regarding war and political crimes committed between August 1996 and July 2003, has been restrictively applied since Kabila's killers are excluded.

The former head of state and father of current President Joseph Kabila was gunned down at his residence on January 16, 2001, by a young officer in his bodyguard, Lieutenant Rashidi Kuseruka, who was in turn shot dead by Kabila's aide de camp, Colonel Eddy Kapend.

The country was then in the grip of a rebel war that drew in six other African armies on rival sides and ended in 2003 at an estimated cost of at least three million lives. Kinshasa politicians swiftly chose Joseph Kabila, then a senior serving army officer, to take his father's place.

Kapend himself was arrested as a prime suspect in Kabila's assassination, and was in January 2003 sentenced to death by a special military tribunal with some 30 other convicted conspirators and no right of appeal. They all pleaded their innocence during the nine-month trial and denounced the arbitrary nature of the court.

"The political situation in the country has changed and people's minds have calmed down somewhat," Lofele said. He appealed for an amnesty or a retrial to find out "the truth" and also serve the cause of "national reconciliation".

The military court that tried these and other men during the conflict was abolished in April 2003 after the enactment of a transitional constitution and the start of a UN-supervised political transition that has since led to a new constitution and democratically elected institutions in the DRC.

Application of the death sentence has been suspended since the start of the political transition, but politicians and others close to Joseph Kabila have so far strongly opposed either a retrial or the release of those convicted.

However, some elected politicians and the Catholic church have called for clemency, along with non-governmental organisations including rights group La Voix des Sans Voix (Voice of the Voiceless), which has stated that the detainees are regularly deprived of food rations and medical care in Kinshasa central prison.

The NGO says their jail conditions have deteriorated since an unspecified number escaped in October 2006.

Kabila's mausoleum is exceptionally open to the public on the anniversary of his assassination and it is also a paid public holiday across the DRC, but no commemorations are held.

- AFP