At least six inmates have died of diarrheal disease in New Bell prison, Douala, since March. Among them, an activist from the Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon (MRC), who died on Thursday.
Rodrigue Ndagueho Koufet had been sentenced to three years in prison for having participated in the demonstrations of September 20, 2020. Reached by RFI, Maître Emmanuel Simh, national vice-president of the MRC and lawyer for the opposition party, denounced the ” double jeopardy suffered by Cameroonian political prisoners.
” In the prisons of Yaoundé and Douala, there has been a major cholera epidemic which is due to the disastrous conditions of detention of its prisoners, in particular by the lack of running water. This lack of water, therefore, causes this serious disease which has almost decimated, for a few days, prisoners, in the Douala prison, in particular.
Our militant died in these conditions. It should be noted that he had been chained to his hospital bed despite his illness. He suffered what I call a double punishment: he was punished for having dared to express his political opinion, on the one hand, and on the other hand, he died in prison as a result of this cholera. Not only does our government imprison people for their political opinions, but, even worse, it does not have the capacity to provide these prisoners with simply acceptable conditions of detention. »