This is a case that dates back to December 2017. People arrested in Cameroon had been accused of the attempted assassination of the President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguéma. We learned yesterday, Friday March 18, that the Yaoundé Military Court had rendered its judgment at the beginning of the week, after four years of proceedings. Sentences ranging from 30 to 35 years in prison were pronounced, the lawyers are appealing.
The Yaoundé Military Court delivered its judgment on Monday March 14, in a mobile hearing in Ebolowa where the detainees had been transferred in 2020. Thus, 25 people, aged 24 to 59, of Central African, Chadian, Equatoguinean and Cameroonian nationalities, were sentenced to terms ranging from 30 to 35 years in prison for acts of “conspiracy to assassinate the President of Equatorial Guinea”, “import of arms”, “hostility against the homeland” and “illegal immigration”.
The convicts had been arrested in December 2017 in Yaoundé, Douala and Kye-Ossi (in southern Cameroon) and were prosecuted for the offenses at the time qualified as the attempted assassination of the Equatorial Guinean president.
Maître Emmanuel Simh, one of the two lawyers for the convicts, explains why he and his colleague decided to appeal this decision, at the microphone ofAmelie Tuletfrom the Africa editorial staff.
” We would not understand how we can condemn for conspiracy people who did not know each other before, and who for the most part met in the prison of Yaoundé.
The weapons seized were not seized from any of these people and we also do not see how Chadians or Cameroonians or Central Africans can be prosecuted for hostility against Equatorial Guinea in accordance with the Cameroonian penal code which speaks of hostility against homeland when a national takes up arms against his own country.
The considerations, which may be political, escape us. As lawyers, we will content ourselves with pleading this file on a purely legal level and hope, when the time comes, to obtain the acquittal of the persons for whom we are responsible. »
In the Chadian section of this file, eleven Chadian nationals were sentenced in June 2016 to twenty years in prison.
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