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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Angola jails four over links to Togo team attackers: report |
| 2010-08-04 |
| [The Nation (Nairobi)] An Angolan court jailed four people Tuesday over links to a militant group which carried out a deadly gun attack on Togo's football team during the Africa Cup of Nations in January, local media said. The court in the restive northern enclave of Cabinda found the four, described by Human Rights Watch as activists, guilty of crimes against state security, Catholic broadcaster Radio Ecclesia said. The trial has been sharply criticised by rights groups that accused the government of using the attacks to justify a crackdown on critics. University professor Belchior Lanso was sentenced to six years in prison, lawyer Francisco Luemba and Catholic priest Raul Tati to five years each, and former police officer Jose Benjamin Fuca to three years, the radio said. The shooting attack during the Africa Cup of Nations, which killed two members of the Togolese national team, was claimed by the separatist guerrilla movement Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC). The four men were arrested because they had documents about FLEC and had travelled to Paris for meetings with exiled leaders. A total of nine people were arrested in connection with the Togo attack, but only two of them have any direct link to the shooting, according to Human Rights Watch. One meeting had been requested by a government-backed mediator, according to Jose Marcos Mavungo, an independent human rights activist who monitored the trial. Mavungo said the trial had been marked by contradictory evidence from the state about the nature of the charges, which initially appeared to centre on the shooting itself but later focussed on the meetings in Paris. Radio Ecclesia said demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse Tuesday to protest the trial, as heavily armed riot police guarded the building. FLEC separatists have been fighting for Cabinda's independence for more than three decades. Despite a peace deal in 2006, FLEC factions continue to wage low-level attacks in the oil-rich province that is separated from the rest of Angola by a strip of territory belonging to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. |
| Posted by:Fred |