Congo court sentences 51 to death over murders of UN experts

A military court in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Saturday sentenced 51 people to death, several in absentia, in a mass trial over the 2017 murder of two UN experts in a troubled central region.

Capital punishment is frequently pronounced in murder cases in DRC but is routinely commuted to life imprisonment since the country declared a moratorium on executions in 2003.

Dozens of people have been on trial for more than four years over a killing that shook diplomats and the aid community, although key questions about the episode remain unanswered.

Michael Sharp, an American, and Zaida Catalan, a Swedish-Chilean, disappeared as they probed violence in the Kasai region after being hired to do so by the United Nations.

They were investigating mass graves linked to a bloody conflict that had flared between the government and a local group.

Their bodies were found in a village on March 28, 2017, 16 days after they went missing. Catalan had been beheaded.

Unrest in the Kasai region had broken out in 2016, triggered by the killing of a local traditional chief, the Kamuina Nsapu, by the security forces.

Around 3,400 people were killed, and tens of thousands of people fled their homes before the conflict fizzled out in mid-2017.

Prosecutors at the military court in Kananga had demanded the death penalty against 51 of the 54 accused, 22 of whom are fugitives and are being tried in absentia.

The charge sheet ranged from terrorism and murder to participation in an insurrectional movement and the act of a war crime through mutilation.

ARR