Sao Tome prosecutors have charged three firefighters and four civilians with assault, serious coercion, torture and other ill-treatment, and the kidnapping of a woman killed in December for allegedly practicing witchcraft.
The civil protection and fire safety officials, including the first deputy chief in pre-trial detention, the chief agent and the first-class agent, were accused of acting “in the authorship of materials, in a finished form and in real competition.” [de] crime causing bodily harm […] and serious crime of coercion.”
The four civilians, three of whom are currently in custody, were charged with being co-authors of explicit and actual complicity in “the crime of torture and other serious cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment” and “apparently , with the crime of causing grievous bodily harm,” as well as for the “crime of kidnapping.”
All defendants are accused of involvement in actions that led to the death of a 57-year-old woman who “suffered from epilepsy with mental disorders.”
According to the deputy, as a direct and necessary consequence of the actions of the civil defendants, the woman “received several bodily injuries,” which resulted in severe multiple injuries and which “became the direct cause of hemorrhagic shock and subsequent death.” .
According to the indictment, in the early morning hours of December 20 last year, the woman was wandering in front of the Agua Grande Fire Department headquarters when she was questioned by corporate officers who inflicted “kicks on her thigh and leg” and “several slaps in the face in vague areas of the body,” acts that culminated which became only about three o’clock in the morning, when the order of the current officer was received “all to withdraw to command.”
The deputy alleges that the civil defendants and other unidentified suspects then took the woman to the backyard of one of the defendants, who accused her of “killing her with witchcraft,” pressuring her to cure her, at which point she was brutally assaulted between 03:00 and 5:00.
According to the prosecution, the woman was left naked and dragged to a pole, where she was tied up and filmed before emergency personnel took her to hospital.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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