Three Americans were sentenced to death canceled

Last year, three Americans convicted of their role in a defaulting coup in the Democratic Republic of Congo were sentenced to life imprisonment, the presidency said.

They were among the 37 people sentenced to death last September by a military court.

The three were accused of having conducted an attack on the presidential palace and the house of an ally of President Félix Tshisekedi last May.

The reversal of sentences has a visit to Dr Congo before the new American adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos.

Boulos, stepfather of President Donald Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, is expected to arrive on Thursday in Kinshasa during a trip that will also take him to Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.

The United States did not say that the three Americans were wrongly imprisoned in Dr. Congo, but the State Department previously said that there had been talks between countries on this subject.

The three were found guilty of criminal plot, terrorism and other charges, which they denied.

The chief suspect of the plot, Christian Malanga, an American national of Congolese origin, was killed during the attack, as well as five others.

A total of 51 people were tried before a military court, with audiences broadcast on national television and radio.

Fourteen people were acquitted and released, the court concluding that they had no connection with the attack.

The death sentences have not been executed in Dr. Congo for about two decades and the convicts who receive the penalty generally served in perpetuity.

The government raised this moratorium in March of this year, citing the need to withdraw the “traitors” of the country’s dysfunctional army. However, no death penalty has since been carried out.

Tshisekedi President signed the order to communicate to the Americans on Tina Salama on Tina Salama on Tina Salama.

The three – Marcel Malanga Malu, Tylor Thomson and Zalman Polun Benjamin – obtained an “individual mercy”, by the president, according to Salama.

Ckiness Ciamba, one of Malanga’s lawyers, told the news agency in Reuters that “presidential forgiveness is a first step that promises major changes in the future”.

Jean-Jacques Wondo, a double Congolese and Belgian citizen who was also sentenced to death, was transferred in February to Belgium due to poor health. It is not clear if the Americans could also be sent home to serve their sentences.

It is not clear either if the other convicted people, including a British, a Belgian and a Canadian national, will also commute their sentences.

The coup attempt began in the capital, Kinshasa, in the early hours of May 19, when the armed men attacked Kamerhe’s parliamentary for the first time before going to the president’s official residence in the capital.

Witnesses say that a group of around twenty attackers in army uniform attacked the palace and that an exchange of shots followed.

Additional report by Emery Makumeno in Kinshasa