Last foreign detainee in the May 2024 coup attempt case extradited to the United Kingdom
The last foreign national detainee held in connection with the May 2024 coup attempt case was extradited to the United Kingdom on Tuesday, March 31, following a request filed by London. Yusuf Ezangi had been sentenced to death, alongside about forty other defendants.
In the night of May 19, 2024, a commando of hooded men infiltrated the Palace of the Nation, the office of the head of state, after having stormed the residence of the president of the National Assembly at the time, Vital Kamerhe. They were initially six foreign nationals involved in this case. Three American nationals were extradited one year ago, and their trial in the United States is expected during this month of April.
In the same interval, Belgium had secured the exfiltration of its citizen, Jean-Jacques Wondo, a Belgian of Congolese origin. It is within this dynamic that the transfer of the British Yusuf Ezangi, also of Congolese origin, was carried out on Tuesday, March 31, from his cell by decision of the Congolese presidency.
Until late at night, this man, described as the number two of the group that briefly seized control of the presidential palace in May 2024, waited for the arrival of his plane at Ndjili International Airport ahead of his departure.
The operation, according to his lawyers, required nearly a year of negotiations. To date, only one Congolese-origin Canadian national remains detained at Ndolo military prison. In Kinshasa, the Canadian embassy is growing impatient. “But we are making progress in the steps,” a source close to the case says.
An order from the Congolese president, Félix Tshisekedi, is awaited to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment before a potential extradition.
