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The imprisoned leader of English-speaking separatists in Cameroon, Julius Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, has gone on a hunger strike to protest the "disappearance" of fellow inmates following riots in a prison, announced Thursday. one of his lawyers.
Ayuk Tabe, self-proclaimed president of "Ambazonia," the separatist state that the separatists want to create in the country of Central Africa, stopped eating Tuesday at midnight with nine of its supporters, said the president. Joseph Fru attorney at AFP.
In a letter to the Cameroonian Minister of Justice, Laurent Esso, whose AFP verified the authenticity, Ayuk Tabe said that the indefinite hunger strike was a protest against the disappearance of "our compatriots" of two prisons.
Hundreds of detainees mutinied on July 22 in an overcrowded central prison in the capital, Yaoundé, and the next day in a prison in Buea, the capital of one of the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon.
The rioters, many of whom were government opponents or supporters of the English-speaking separatist movement, filmed their protest and posted elements on Facebook.
The government announced 177 arrests, including English-speaking separatists.
But he denied rumors that an Anglophone leader, Mancho Bibixy, was tortured and killed by the authorities.
Kondengui prison in Yaoundé was built to house 1,500 detainees, but it is estimated that it will house more than double the prison.
He holds many detainees arrested since the beginning of the security crisis between the English-speaking separatist regions of the west and the francophone population elsewhere in 2016.
Many of them are serving long prison sentences, others are awaiting trial.
Since 2017, fighting has killed hundreds of people and forced more than 500,000 people to leave their homes.
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