Sentenced to almost 30 years in prison in Equatorial Guinea, the leader of the outlawed Citizens for Innovation party

June 28 (EUROPA PRESS) –

A military court in Equatorial Guinea has sentenced the leader of the dissolved opposition party Citizens for Innovation, Gabriel Nsé Obiang Obono, to almost 30 years in prison on charges of “insulting the Armed Forces” and “homicide” after the assault carried out by the security forces in September 2022 against the headquarters of the formation.

Nsé Obiang has been sentenced to 29 and a half years in prison in the framework of a process in which nine other members or followers of the party have received sentences of between nine and eleven years in prison, as reported by the Equatoguinean news portal Now eg.

The defendants were being tried for crimes of illicit association, illegal meetings, illegal possession of weapons and ammunition, attacking law enforcement officers, serious injuries and homicide, although Nsé Obiang has also been convicted of “abusive exercise of fundamental rights”. .

Citizens for Innovation has not yet ruled on the sentence, although its Information department published before the ruling that the authorities had ordered “to close the main streets” of the capital, Malabo, for the transfer of Nsé Obiang.

Thus, he affirmed that the president of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang, considers the opponent as “an enemy for life”, while stating that the court was going to “confirm the political sentence imposed and predicted during a trap called trial”. .

The opponent was arrested at the end of September 2022 along with more than a hundred members and supporters of the party after going to the headquarters of Citizens for Innovation –dissolved in 2018–, before a siege by the security forces , who finally broke into the facility by force.

The opposition formation, the only one that won a seat in the 2017 parliamentary elections, denounced that Nsé Obiang and “some 400 of his militants” were under “siege” for nearly seven days “without any judicial order to justify it.” The incidents resulted in the death of several civilians and an agent.

The 81-year-old president, the longest-serving president in the world, was re-elected in November 2022, in an election in which he obtained 94.9 percent of the vote. The opposition Convergence for Social Democracy of Equatorial Guinea (CPDS) rejected the results, stating that the vote had been “fraudulent, undemocratic and unfair.”

Obiang has led Equatorial Guinea since the coup against his uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, who became the country’s first president after independence from Spain in 1968. Despite the fact that there are 18 legalized parties in the country, in practice there are no opponents with real options to remove Obiang from power, amid speculation about the possibility of a ‘dynastic’ succession that would lead to the rise of his son. Teodorín’, vice president since 2016.