Congo: Attanasio death, life imprisonment sentence to the 6 defendants

Six men have been sentenced to life in prison by a military court in Kinshasa for the murder of the Italian ambassador, Luca Attanasio, his bodyguard and a driver in February 2021, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The prosecutor had asked for the death penalty. There were five defendants at the stand while a sixth, the ringleader, is on the run. The prosecution had asked for the death penalty even though a de facto moratorium has been in force for 20 years in the DRC which sees capital sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Instead, the defense had asked for an acquittal for not having committed the crime or at least for doubts about the responsibility of the accused. These, arrested in January of last year, after initial admissions, later declared their innocence claiming that they had been forced to confess with violence, a circumstance denied by the prosecution. Italy, as a civil party and a country strongly opposed to executions, had asked for a just prison sentence to be imposed directly. The sentence is appealable. The 43-year-old Attanasio, the carabiniere Iacovacci and the driver Milambo were fatally injured by gunshots in an ambush set by criminals on a convoy of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) with which he was traveling in the province of Kivu North, an area at high risk for three decades due to the presence of dozens of militias. Tried for murder, criminal association and illegal possession of weapons and ammunition of war, the six Congolese during the hearings had been described by the prosecution as members of a “criminal gang” dedicated to street robberies and who wanted to kidnap the ambassador to purpose of ransom but who then had killed him together with his two collaborators.