DRC Sentences Dozens To Death Over Coup
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
KINSHASA (Worthy News) – Dozens of people, including Americans, faced a tense Sunday after a military court in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) handed down death sentences to them over an alleged coup attempt.
Some 37 suspects, including three Americans as well as a Briton, a Belgian, and a Canadian national, were sentenced for trying to overthrow the African nation’s president, trial observers said.
The men were accused of leading an attack on both the presidential palace and the home of an ally of President Félix Tshisekedi in May.
Christian Malanga, a U.S. national of Congolese origin, the suspected leader of the plot, was killed during the attack, along with five others. In total, 51 people were tried in a military court, and hearings were broadcast on national TV and radio.
Malanga’s son Marcel, one of the US citizens sentenced to death, previously told the court that his father had threatened to kill him unless he took part.
His friend, Tyler Thompson, was also given the death penalty. The pair, aged in their 20s, had played football together in Utah.
His stepmother Miranda Thompson, in June, told broadcaster BBC the family had “zero idea” how he had ended up in the DRC, Africa’s second largest country of 109 million people. “We were in complete shock as to what was happening and the unknown. Everything we were learning was what we were getting off [news site] Google,” she said.
THIRD AMERICAN
The third American, Benjamin Zalman-Polun, had reportedly business interests with Christian Malanga.
Also sentenced to death was Jean-Jacques Wondo, a dual Congolese and Belgian citizen.
The advocacy group Human Rights Watch previously described him as a prominent researcher on regional politics and security and suggested that the evidence connecting him to the coup attempt was thin.
The British and Canadian nationals were reportedly of Congolese origin. The court heard the British national, Youssouf Ezangi, had helped recruit some of the others who took part.
Of the 51 tried, 14 people were acquitted and freed, with the court finding they had no connection to the attack. Those convicted had five days to appeal against their sentences and were believed to weigh their options on Sunday.
Their troubles came as thousands of miles away, the United States rejected allegations that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in an alleged assassination plot against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in another coup case.
Venezuelan officials announced the arrest of three Americans, two Spaniards, and a Czech on Saturday over claims of a plot against Maduro – the Venezuelan president, whose recent re-election is contested.
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