The 26 -year -old press photographer had been shot in an ambush in 2014, when she was reporting with a militia to cover the looting of a village.
Le Monde with AFP
The Reporters Sans Frontières Organization (RSF) denounced, Wednesday, May 11, investigations “completely stopped” in the murder of the young French journalist Camille Lepage in the Central African Republic, May 12, 2014, and asked for justices of the two countries to relaunch the investigation. The 26 -year -old press photographer had been shot in an ambush when she was reporting with a militia to cover the looting of a village in this Central African country in civil war since 2013.
“In recent years, no important act of investigation has been carried out to identify the reasons and the authors of the shots on the motorized convoy on which Camille Lepage was located,” said RSF in a press release. “The witnesses were not all interviewed, certain avenues were not explored, no reconstruction of the facts was made and the investigation file even was not found for several months” in the Central African Republic, recalled the NGO.
In France, a fifth investigating judge has just been seized of the file, while in the Central African Republic the trial was returned for additional education, details RSF. “The difficulties linked to the security or health context cannot justify the total absence of involvement of the French and Central African judicial authorities in recent years to identify the authors of this murderous ambush and their mobile,” writes the head of the RSF Africa office , Arnaud Froger.
The track of a settling of accounts excluded
In 2013, a rebellion led by an alliance of armed groups called “Séléka”, a Muslim majority, had overturned President François Bozizé. The latter, as well as caciques of his regime, had then created or federated so-called “anti-balaka” militias, dominated by Christians and animists. An extremely deadly civil war opposed the two coalitions before lowering intensity from 2018. The UN accused the two war crimes and humanity camps in 2014 and 2015.
Several theses concerning the mobile of the attack on which Camille Lepage was the victim were mentioned, including that of an ambush targeting the anti-balaka convoy in which she was. The track of a settlement of accounts within this armed group was too quickly dismissed, according to Vincent Fillola, the lawyer for the Lepage family, who deplores that French justice has deployed “neither the means nor the necessary will “For the investigation to advance, according to the press release.