They regret “the deafening silence of the Chadian authorities.” The relatives of a Franco-Chadian arrested on July 10 at the airport in the capital N’Djamena before a flight to France denounced on Saturday an “enforced disappearance,” in a statement sent to AFP.
Ismaïl Ngakoutou, former deputy general manager of a Chadian commercial bank, “was kidnapped by Chadian intelligence agents at N’Djamena airport as he was preparing to board his flight to France,” his support committee assures, without any news of him. “Mr. Ismaïl is in fact a hostage and is now part of what we call the victims of forced disappearances,” the committee concludes.
His relatives denounce “the deafening silence of the Chadian authorities” and demand “the opening of a completely independent investigation to shed light on this affair”.
Deprivation of liberty?
According to lawyers Dominique Tricaud, from the Paris bar, and Ditchibe Moundine and Ouchaka Mahamad, from the Chad bar, the N’Djamena public prosecutor stated that Ngakoutou was “placed at the disposal of the courts following the complaint of a person of Chinese nationality and questioned on the basis of a report”. However, they have not received a copy of this complaint. Contacted on Saturday, the prosecutor did not wish to comment immediately.
In mid-August, Ngakoutou’s lawyers sent a request to the chairperson-rapporteur of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, calling on him to take action with the Chadian authorities for the “immediate and definitive release” of Ngakoutou, as well as to investigate “his deprivation of liberty.”
His lawyers also filed a complaint against an unknown person in mid-August in France with the Public Prosecutor of the Paris judicial court concerning the situation in Ngakoutou, according to the acknowledgment of receipt of the complaint consulted by AFP.
An election deemed “not credible”
National and international NGOs as well as the opposition regularly denounce “human rights violations” and “repression”, sometimes bloody, in this vast Sahelian country in central Africa.
Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno was elected president in the first round on May 6 with 61% of the vote, in an election deemed “not credible” by NGOs after a three-year transition period that began after the death of his father Marshal Idriss Déby Itno, who ruled Chad with an iron fist for more than 30 years, killed by rebels on his way to the front.
