(JED/IFEX) – On Tuesday 13 March 2001, Yvette Kasongo, wife of Guy Kasongo Kilembwe, editor-in-chief of the Kinshasa-based satirical weekly “Pot-Pourri”, told JED that her husband is ill, suffering from malaria. He is currently imprisoned at the National Information Agency’s (Agence nationale des renseignements, ANR) detention centre on Nguma Avenue in Kinshasa/Ngaliema. On Monday 12 […]
(JED/IFEX) – On Tuesday 13 March 2001, Yvette Kasongo, wife of Guy Kasongo Kilembwe, editor-in-chief of the Kinshasa-based satirical weekly “Pot-Pourri”, told JED that her husband is ill, suffering from malaria. He is currently imprisoned at the National Information Agency’s (Agence nationale des renseignements, ANR) detention centre on Nguma Avenue in Kinshasa/Ngaliema. On Monday 12 March, the journalist’s family managed to send him medication. The food they had sent him was sent back by the guards. Earlier, the journalist had discreetly sent a note to his wife in which he had specifically asked for medication and food.
Unfortunately, JED notes that fourteen days after his arrest, Kasongo has yet to be brought before a magistrate. Rather, after first being held by the Congolese National Police’s Special Services, he has since been shuttled between the political police force’s various detention centres. This despite President Joseph Kabila’s 8 March order closing all detention centres not answerable to the republic’s public prosecutors’ offices. JED denounces the fact that since his transfer to various ANR cells, the journalist has been forbidden from receiving visitors, in violation of the law.
According to information obtained from the Congolese National Police’s Special Services, Kasongo is accused of “defamation against the republic”. If this grievance is true, JED once again asks that the journalist be released immediately, since, according to international principles on defamation, public institutions cannot claim to be defamed. Even if, through some absurd circumstance, defamation took place in this instance, the ANR is not fit to determine whether such an infraction occured.
Kasongo was taken in for questioning on Wednesday 28 February in Kinshasa. JED representatives met with him on Saturday 3 March and Monday 5 March, in his cell in the former Régina Hotel’s yard, in Kinshasa/Gombe. The journalist told JED that his police interrogation was more specifically focused on “the satirical newspaper’s manifest hatred towards the minister of state responsible for the interior, Gaëtan Kakudji”, who, statutorally, oversees the Congolese National Police.
