A Cameroonian media tycoon arrested in February in connection with the murder of prominent journalist Martinez Zogo has been charged with complicity in torture and given a six-month pre-trial detention in the Kondengui Principal Prison in the capital Yaounde.
Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga and his co-accused were transferred from the national gendarmerie headquarters—where they underwent questioning for 25 days—to the prison on March 4, a day after making their second appearance at the Military Court in the capital.
Among the more than 20 other accused sent to Kondengui alongside Amougou Belinga are Leopold Maxime Eko Eko, head of the General Directorate for External Research (similar to the FBI), and its director of operations Justin Danwe.
The accused face life imprisonment if found guilty.
However, several people suspected of involvement in the case also appeared before the court, among them the Director of the L’Anecdote media group, Bruno Bidjang, retired Colonel Etoundi Nsoe, his father-in-law as well as Amougou Belinga’s personal driver—have been freed.
The lifeless body of the popular announcer of the privately-owned Amplitude FM radio station was found in an advanced state of decomposition on Jan. 22, 2023.
Zogo, who ran a daily satirical slot was abducted on Jan. 17 near his home in Yaounde by unidentified men.
In his program, he denounced daily the embezzlers of public wealth by mentioning them by name.
His disappearance was announced at a time when he was investigating and denouncing the embezzlement of funds by Amougou Belinga through fake contracts obtained at the presidential security directorate.
Disgust in Cameroon
Meanwhile, in a recent media briefing, Cameroon’s communication minister and government spokesman Rene Emmanuel Sadi decried national and international press for taking advantage of the assassination of the journalist to “put a state and a regime on trial through excessive and even insulting remarks.“They even go as far as making clumsy and ill-considered prophecies about the future of Cameroon,” he said.
Sadi described such media outlets, including Reporters Without Borders and renowned French newspaper Le Monde as being in search of “sensation and notoriety.”
He insisted the killing of Zogo has aroused the disgust of all in Cameroon and that the despicable murder was similar to “many others that have occurred elsewhere in the world, including in the most advanced democracies.”
Consequently, the journalist’s murder “should in no way cast doubt on or call into question the remarkable progress and, fundamentally, the irreversible progress of Cameroon towards the consolidation of the rule of law and democracy,” Sadi said.
For the Zogo family, their 51-year-old son died a martyr for the cause of social justice in Cameroon.
“For us, this indictment is a breakthrough,” Zogo’s elder sister Moungou Crespence told The Epoch Times. “We, however, remain anxious for what happens next.
“Our ultimate quest now is to know the masterminds behind the kidnap, torture, and murder of our brother. All we want is that they should face justice. Martinez died a martyr,” she said.
On March 23, an Appeal Court adjourned to April 13 a case calling for the provisional release of Amougou Belinga.
Eko Eko was charged with negligence in service and violation of instructions, while Danwe and other accomplices, were charged with kidnap and torture.
Nsoe and Bidjang were granted conditional bail to appear before the military tribunal whenever summoned.
Charges against 12 others detained in connection with the journalist’s murder were simply dropped.
Zogo’s naked and decomposing body was found about 12 miles from Yaounde five days later with a broken right foot, his fingers chopped off, and his body mutilated.
He is due to be buried early next month.
Moungou Zogo told The Epoch Times it is against the family’s wish that the corpse has still not been buried following the autopsy that was conducted shortly after his mutilated corpse was found.
To her, this “only deepens our pain every passing day.”
“In our custom, someone who is murdered is buried immediately—often on the same day. We don’t see why it should continue to be kept in the mortuary. We want it buried,” she said.
While Zogo’s family sees the indictment of suspects as a positive sign toward finding justice for their son, many observers continue to question the transparency of the procedure.
A lawyer keenly following up on the case told The Epoch Times all the defendants “still enjoy [a] presumption of innocence” in line with Section 8 of Cameroon’s Criminal Procedure Code.
“The examining magistrate will determine whether these people actually committed the offense for him to charge them before the open court, or to discharge them if what he sees in the holding charge doesn’t tie with his own investigations,” barrister Amungwa Tanyi of Nde Ntso and Associates law firm told The Epoch Times.
“Torture is a felonious offense with a maximum punishment of life imprisonment,” according to Amungwa.
“The examining magistrate has the prerogative to amend the charge and in so doing, he can even qualify it as assault occasioning death which is different from torture and as a result, the punishment won’t be the same.”
“And he is the person that instructed that a commission be created to investigate the crime,” said Amungwa.
“How can we trust this process when several calls for the questioning of some ministers like that of Justice and Finance have gone unheeded? The police investigation took longer than expected [more than a month], raising further questions.”
Information Hoarding
Angela Quintal, the African program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) denounces the fact that investigations into Zogo’s murder are fraught with “too much opaqueness and very little openness.”“I am frustrated,” Quintal told The Epoch Times in an email.
“CPJ has called for transparency and public accountability in the investigation into Martinez Zogo’s murder and the prosecution of those accused of his killing.
“Yet, I have yet to see any evidence of a culture of embracing the public’s and the media’s right to access information.”
No official statement or court document specifying the charges for each defendant has been made public.
“Given the high-profile nature of the case, one would expect that such basic information would be freely available,” said Quintal.
But Sadi pushed back, stating that any communication on a case still undergoing judicial police investigation, “is governed by the relevant provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code, which provides in its Section 102 sub-section 1 that ’the entire judicial police investigation process shall be secret.'”
“Neither the Government of the Republic nor the media are an exception to this rule,” Sadi said.
Amid growing national and international scrutiny, Quintal says a proper communication strategy to prioritize reliable, timely, and accurate information on the current investigations is a necessity.
Openness Not ‘Secrecy’
“Openness should be favored instead of secrecy,” she said.“This can be done without compromising the investigation or the rights of the suspect. Sadi, after all, is the minister of communications, not the minister of secrecy.”
A few days before his abduction, Zogo had said on-air that he possessed documents proving that senior state officials had stolen several million U.S. dollars in public funds since 2013 and threatened to denounce them.
Cameroon is the second-worst jailer of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa and fifth on the continent with at least six journalists behind bars as of Dec. 1, 2021, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Reporters Without Borders (RWB) also claims Cameroon is one of Africa’s “most dangerous countries for journalists,” who operate in a hostile and precarious environment.
“Beyond the shocking statements and confessions of all those under arrest as part of Martinez Zogo’s killing, I believe, the most important thing is to provide justice to the journalist, his family, and his friends,” said Sadibou Marong, director of RWB’s sub-Saharan Africa bureau to The Epoch Times.
The particularity of Zogo’s killing is that it was planned at a very high-level profile of the state, he said.
“We have also seen in the past other situation like that of Samuel Wazizi who, authorities said, died in a military hospital four days after being transferred there from Buea, and his death was the “result of a severe sepsis” not of “any act of torture.”
“We know that was denied by his family members who were never informed about his death,” according to Marong who added that Cameroonian journalists are constantly exposed to “the threat of a verbal or physical attack, and arrest, a gag suit and even murder.”
‘Cemetery for Journalists’
Less than two weeks after Zogo’s mutilated corpse was found, another radio presenter and Orthodox priest, Jean-Jacques Ola Bebe, was found dead near his home in Yaounde, apparently shot by unknown assailants.Both Ola Bebe and Martinez Zogo were outspoken voices against corruption—always using their platforms on the radio to denounce cases of alleged misappropriation of public funds.
A few days before he was killed, Zogo’s name and those of over half a dozen other Cameroonian investigative journalists and whistle-blowers allegedly lined up for murder for investigating a massive embezzlement scandal went viral on social media.
Paul Chouta was one of those listed for death. He has faced kidnap, torture, and imprisonment in the past for denouncing acts of corruption involving state officials and still feels insecure.
“Since Martinez’s murder, unknown individuals continue to trail me. I have been told about schemes underway to kill me. They want to kill me at all costs,” Chouta told The Epoch Times.
“Martinez and Ola’s successive deaths simply confirm that Cameroon is a cemetery for journalists.”
Shocked at Indifference
Chouta said each time he reports incidents to the police, “nothing concrete is done."“I am shocked at the indifference shown by police officials despite my numerous complaints. This pushes me to ponder if I am actually reporting myself to the same people who are out to kill me,” he says.
“Wherever I find myself today I am extremely vigilant. I continue to see strange faces around my home.”
In a damning editorial published last month, a French daily newspaper and a world-famous voice in journalism Le Monde described Zogo’s torture and murder as “a terrifying sign of the decomposition of a monarchical regime in which the submissive justice system is used to eliminate opponents.”
“To say that Cameroon is like a monarchy—with a justice system at the mercy of orders—where violence, secrecy, clannism, and predation prevail, and where journalism is a dangerous profession, is not only an untruth but also a gruesome and thinly veiled instrumentalization that, to say the least, discredits this renowned newspaper,” Sadi said.
As the examining magistrate opens fresh investigations to determine the guilt of defendants in the Zogo murder case, barrister Amungwa still nurses reservations.
The examining magistrate has the right to conduct searches, to call more witnesses, to visit the crime scene, as well as the right to get experts, he says.
He is independent and not bound by the police report or the holding charge, yet his decision “can be appealed [upon] at the inquiry control chamber of the court of appeal by the defendant or the prosecutor. ”
Amungwa said the defendants still enjoy such rights as, “The right for an interpreter before the examining magistrate if there is need; the right to inform the defendant to get a lawyer to defend him; the right for the defendant to reserve his statement; and the right of the lawyer to access the case file of the defendant to prepare for his defense.”
“All of these constitute the rights of defense which if violated, the procedure will be considered null and void,” he told The Epoch Times.
Amungwa insists Zogo made “judicious” use of the classified information that later cost him his life.
“But because it was going to ... undo some skeletons that top government officials had been keeping in their cupboards, they decided to silence him.”
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