E. GUINEA PRESIDENCY DENIES AI ALLEGATIONS
Panafrican News Agency (PANA) Daily Newswire
April 18, 2005
Malabo, Equatorial Guinea (PANA) – Equatorial Guinea has described
Amnesty International as a “faceless organisation” following the human
rights body’s recent allegations that inmates were nearly starving
at Black Beach, the Malabo central jail.
“The information given by Amnesty International which, for us, is
a faceless organisation of individuals with unknown intentions are
false and ungrounded,” a special presidential adviser charged with
missions and the press, Miguel Oyono Ndong Mifumu, said.
According to him, “all the prisoners receive their daily food
supplies,” while mercenaries, who have their food habits different
from Equato-Guineans, “have an adequate diet and a special budget to
that effect.”
“Amnesty is seeking to exert pressure on the government to free
the mercenaries. It is serving the interest of the mercenaries’
families. But we think that what it must do is to verify in situ,
as does the International Red Cross, to bolster its affirmations,”
Mifumu contended.
AI on Thursday said in London that at least 70 prisoners were
threatened with imminent starvation in the Black Beach prison in
Malabo after the country’s authorities ceased to give them food.
According to the rights body, the inmates, among them 11 foreigners
(six Armenians and five South Africans) sentenced last November for
their involvement in an attempted putsch against President Teodoro
Obiang Nguema, and Equatorial Guinea opposition leaders jailed without
a trial since last year, were “in a lamentable state.”
A number of them “are already extremely weak due to torture or poorly
treated chronic diseases,” the organisation charged.