A former minister imprisoned under the junta in power in Guinea for a year died on Saturday after his health deteriorated in prison, his brother said overnight. Lounceny Camara, 62, was one of many former ministers and senior figures in office under Alpha Condé to have been implicated for alleged financial embezzlement and to have been imprisoned under the soldiers who overthrew the former president in September 2021.
Former Minister of Town Planning and then Tourism, former deputy, former president of the electoral commission, an equally important position, Louceny Camara suffered a stroke on Friday in detention in Conakry prison and died on Saturday evening in hospital, his brother Ibrahima Camara told an AFP correspondent.
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Urgent appeals from his family to the special court for financial offences, set up by the junta, for him to be evacuated abroad went unheeded, he said. “The family did everything to allow us to evacuate him to specialized centers abroad, unfortunately we did not find an attentive ear.“, he said. Louceny Camara had already been admitted to the emergency room in early May a few days after his incarceration.
He had been charged and imprisoned on April 28 for alleged acts of “embezzlement of public funds», «illicit enrichment», «money laundering“, and “corruption“. He was a prominent member of the Rally of the People of Guinea (RPG), the party of Alpha Condé, which presided from the end of 2010 until its fall in 2021 this poor country with a troubled political history.
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Amnesty International, very critical of the human rights situation in Guinea, spoke in February 2021 of Guinean prisons as being “common knowledge of places of death where the rules of international law for the treatment of detainees are not applied“. Amnesty denounced at the time the death of four detainees in two months after a wave of arrests under the Condé presidency.
Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, who took power by force on September 5, 2021 and has since been sworn in as president, has proclaimed the fight against corruption, deemed endemic, as one of his priorities. Many personalities of the old regime but also of the old opposition are worried. Different voices are raised to denounce an instrumentalization of justice and an authoritarian exercise of power.