The three accused were sentenced by the special criminal court. This is the first verdict of this hybrid court, created in 2015 and made up of local and international magistrates.
Le Monde with AFP
Three members of a Central African armed group were sentenced on Monday October 31 to sentences ranging from twenty years in prison to life for crimes against humanity by the Special Criminal Court (CPS). This is the first verdict of this hybrid court, made up of local and international magistrates.
Issa Sallet Adoum, Yaouba Ousman and Mahamat Tahir, members of the 3R group (for “return, complaint and rehabilitation”) and accused of the massacre, on May 21, 2019, of forty-six civilians in villages of the northwest, have been found guilty of murders, inhuman acts and humiliating and degrading treatments have notably. The first was sentenced to life and the other two to twenty years’ imprisonment.
The CPS was created in 2015 by the government under the sponsorship of the United Nations (UN) to judge war crimes and crimes against humanity committed since 2003; This first verdict was particularly expected. The trial had opened on April 25 and the prosecution had requested, in mid-August, the perpetuity for the three accused.
acquitted from “torture as a war crime”
Issa Sallet Adoum was also condemned in his “quality of military chief” for “rapes committed by his constituent subordinates”, for crimes against the Humanity and war crimes, said the CPS press release. Mahamat Tahir, who claims his innocence, presented herself weakened at the hearing, on a stretcher, after having started a hunger strike for twenty -one days, found AFP journalists.
The accused have three days to appeal, specifies the CPS, who acquitted them from the leaders of “torture as a war crime”. The Central African Republic, the second least developed country in the world according to the UN, has been the theater since 2013 of a civil war, very deadly in its early years but which has dropped in intensity since 2018.
She opposed, in the first years, militias with a coalition majority in the Séléka alliance, to others -the anti -balaka -, dominated by Christians and animists, the UN accusing the Two camps of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The civil war continues today between rebel armed groups, from the Séléka and anti-balaka sometimes united, and the army of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra supported by hundreds of Russian paramilitaries.