Cameroon/17 people charged in the assassination of a journalist

While the trial for the assassination of Martinez Zogo, channel manager of the urban radio Amplitude FM is due to open on March 22, around twenty men were arrested, then charged with murder, complicity in assassination and torture etc. 

According to the referral order signed by the military investigating judge in charge of the case of the assassination of journalist Martinez Zogo, three elements of the Directorate General of External Research (DGRE), the Cameroonian counter-espionage service will be prosecuted for “assassination”. 

Two others, Lieutenant-Colonel Justin Danwe, former director of operations of the DGRE and Martin Stéphane Savom, current Mayor of the commune of Bibey, will be prosecuted for “complicity in assassination”. 

Businessman Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga and Léopold Maxime Eko Eko, former head of the DGRE, the two best-known defendants in this affair, will ultimately be prosecuted for “complicity in torture” according to their lawyers. 

The trial, which promises to be heated, is due to open on March 22, according to our sources. In view of the multiple pressures and irregularities denounced by the different parties, the defense counsel of the businessman Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga, prosecuted for "complicity in torture", hopes that the trial will not only be open to the public but also televised: “whenyou see the scale that this case has taken and the national and international mobilization that the media have brought to this case, we believe that, to avoid traffic jams inside this court and for all those who want to know the truth , it would be desirable that thistrial is televised. We saw in Guinea with the Dadis Camara affair. Because when you have heated public opinion to this point, it is good for the truth to appear for everyone to see. Because ultimately justice is done in whose name? Justice is delivered in the name of the Cameroonian people. »

The closure of the judicial investigation comes thirteen months after the disappearance of the journalist. In total, it will have consumed three investigating judges. It was in January 2023 that journalist Martinez Zogo was kidnapped, tortured then murdered and thrown into the bush in a suburb of Yaoundé. The journalist was carrying out investigations into corruption and embezzlement in Cameroon.