A former president of the East African nation of Comoros, Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, has been given a life sentence for “high treason,” according to reports from local media and the AFP news agency.
A political opponent of President Azali Assoumani, Sambi was sentenced by the State Security Court, a special judicial body whose rulings are final and cannot be appealed, the Tanzania Daily News reports. The defendant was found guilty of selling passports to stateless people in the Gulf.
Public prosecutor Ali Mohamed Djounaid claimed in court, “He betrayed the mission entrusted to him by the Comorians.” He then asked the court for a life sentence.
Sambi, 64, who ruled the small nation in the Indian Ocean archipelago between 2006 and 2011, passed a law in 2008 that legalised the sale of passports for exorbitant prices.
The so-called Bidoon are an undocumented Arab minority in the tens of thousands, and their nationality was the target of the controversial plan.
Djounaid claims that the former president stole $1.8 billion through the scam, which is more than the entire GDP of the country.
An attorney for civilian plaintiffs, Emmanuel Sossa, was quoted in the local media as saying, “They gave thugs the right to sell Comorian nationality as if they were selling peanut.”
Sambi’s attorney Jean-Gilles Halimi denied the allegations, claiming the state had presented no proof of the missing funds or fictitious bank accounts.
Sambi didn’t attend his trial because he didn’t believe he would be treated fairly. When he and his defence team first appeared, he asked the judge to recuse himself because he had been on the grand jury that decided to indict him.
Before finally going to trial, the former leader had already spent four years in jail on corruption charges. For disturbing public order, he had been under house arrest before.
It wasn’t until three months later that he was arrested on treason accusations in addition to the embezzlement, corruption, and forgery charges related to the so-called “economic citizenship” controversy.
Tisslame Sambi, Sambi’s daughter, told AFP that her father was a roadblock to Azali Assoumani’s political agenda.
French-Syrian businessman Bashar Kiwan was among the accused; he claimed the government had offered him amnesty in exchange for testifying against the former president.
The Comorian government has issued an official denial of these claims.
The three Comoran islands of Anjouan, Grande Comore, and Moheli have been politically unstable and impoverished since they gained independence from France in 1975.