JOHANNESBURG – Angolan rebels who claimed responsibility for a deadly shooting targeting Togo’s football team yesterday denounced the jailing of four activists, saying they had no links to the insurgency.
‘The sentencing of four human rights activists in Cabinda is a mockery of justice,’ said Rodrigues Mingas, secretary general of FLEC-PM, a faction of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC).’The four men arrested, convicted and sentenced for political reasons by the Angolan court in Cabinda, manipulated by Luanda, are just poor, innocent people who have no real, direct link with FLEC and who were arrested shortly after the shooting,’ he said in a statement received in Johannesburg.The court on Tuesday handed down sentences of between three and six years for university professor Belchior Lanso, lawyer Francisco Luemba, Catholic priest Raul Tati and former police officer Jose Benjamin Fuca.The January 8 shooting attack ahead of the opening of the Africa Cup of Nations, which killed two members of the Togolese national team, was claimed by different FLEC factions.The four men were arrested in the wake of the shooting because they had documents about FLEC and had travelled to Paris for meetings with exiled leaders.They were convicted of crimes against state security, but prosecutors made no link to the attack.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.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. – Nampa-AFP
