The governing junta of Guinea, which toppled former President Alpha Conde in a coup in 2021, is demanding for Conde to be prosecuted.
Over 180 senior officials and former ministers are also being demanded to be prosecuted by the ruling junta for alleged wrongdoing.
One of the military’s major declared wars since assuming power more than a year ago is the fight against corruption, and some former officials have already been jailed in this regard.
However, the Minister of Justice took a new step because he specifically mentioned the former head of state (2010–2021) and a sizable number of his officials while he was in office in his public letter to the attorneys general on Thursday.
Among them are forty former ministers, including the former prime minister Ibrahima Kassory Fofana and former defence, economy, and trade ministers Mohamed Diané, Mamady Camara, and Mariama Camara. The Conde administration’s advisors to the president are also listed.
Alphonse Charles Wright, the minister of justice, provided a list of 188 names in total, some of which are already in prison and others of which have been mentioned numerous times. The document said that their accounts had been frozen.
Forgery and the use of forgeries in official writing, misappropriation of public funds, and complicity are among the offences for which indictments are being brought.
“The Guinean government, in its policy of moralization of public life, has set as an objective the fight against economic and financial offenses,” says the Minister of Justice.
“It is imperative to open judicial investigations to elucidate the origin of the funds in these various accounts without prejudice to the release of funds when it is established in a contradictory manner that these accounts are free of any presumption of illicit enrichment,” he continued.
The 84-year-old former president Alpha Conde, who was charged in May with murder, torture, kidnapping, and rape in a nation where political protests are frequently violently suppressed, has previously faced similar charges.
The National Front for the Defense of the Constitution (FNDC), a group that organised the months-long protest against Conde’s third term beginning in October 2019, had taken action in January 2022, prompting the Guinean judiciary to take action.
Since then, the collective has been disbanded by the junta because its members criticised the “unilateral” handling of the ostensible transition phase and the coup, as well as because they advocated for demonstrations that were outlawed by the authorities.
Many of their leaders are currently incarcerated and suffering.
Colonel Doumbouya, who has been in charge since September 2021, has vowed to transfer authority to chosen civilians within two years beginning in January 2023.
As soon as he came into office, he vowed that justice would be the nation’s “compass” rather than a “witch hunt.”
The trial of former Guinean ruler Moussa Dadis Camara and a dozen former military and government officials, which had been planned for years, began on September 28 in a court in Conakry as an illustration of the junta’s dedication to justice. They are to answer for the horrifying massacre committed on September 28, 2009.
