| World - AP Africa-Reuters 7th Jan. 2003 |
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26 to Get Death for Congo Assassination
KINSHASA, Congo - A military court convicted and sentenced 26 people to death Tuesday in the 2001 assassination of Congo's president, Laurent Kabila.
The verdict was announced in the courtroom after a monthslong trial of 115 defendants. Forty-five defendants were ordered freed. The verdict in the other cases was not immediately clear.
The top defendant, Kabila's cousin and senior aide, Col. Eddy Kapend, was among those the five-member tribunal ordered executed.
Kapend will lodge an appeal for amnesty with President Joseph Kabila, the son and successor of the assassinated leader, said Kapend's lawyer, Franck Mulenda.
It was unclear when the sentences are to be carried out.
Laurent Kabila, a former rebel leader who plunged Congo into a regional war soon after assuming the presidency in 1997, was shot and killed in the presidential palace Jan. 16, 2001.
The gunman, one of his own bodyguards, was killed within minutes of the assassination. Motives and instigators behind the assassination remain a mystery.
Amnesty International has sharply criticized Congo's military court, saying that it routinely denied defendants the right to appeal and that executions were carried out within minutes of verdicts.
More than 200 people have been put to death on the court's orders since 1997, according to Amnesty International.
Since his father's assassination, Joseph Kabila has taken steps toward ending four years of war that aid organizations say led to the deaths of 2.5 million people � mostly from strife-related hunger and disease.
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