“They (the militants) are still under a measure of coercion of deprivation of liberty, we were aware that the process was transferred from the PGR (Prosecutor General's Office) to the District Court, but what concerns us is the drag on the process, after all accounts have been going on for four months”, Maurílio Luyele, deputy from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) told Lusa this Wednesday.
The deputy, who heads a parliamentary delegation from the largest opposition party that has been working in the Angolan province of Uíje since Tuesday, “does not want his comrades to be deprived of exercising their civil and political rights”.
The incidents in Sanza Pombo, one of the 16 municipalities in the province of Uíje, northern Angola, which involved militants from UNITA and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) took place last March and afterwards the supporters of the “maninhos” were detained.
“We hope that we can pressure justice to accelerate, because we understand that delaying justice is the same as denying rights and our objective is therefore to accelerate this process”, he stressed.
The first vice-president of the UNITA parliamentary group also said that his party “has all the data that indicate that there is political interference in the process here”.
“We have a lot of indicators in this regard, because otherwise these detainees should already be released. In a way, yes (they are political prisoners), there is no other explanation,” he considered.
“Even the prosecutors who instructed the case found that many of the detainees were not even at the scene of the aforementioned crime, so that alone shows the dimension of political interference in the case”, concluded the UNITA politician.
Last March, at a press conference in Luanda, UNITA considered the existence of "state terrorism and arbitrary arrests" of its militants, following the conflicts.
UNITA's secretary general, Álvaro Chikwamanga Daniel, said on the occasion that the incidents recorded in Sanza Pombo originated within MPLA militants who "tried to derail" an act to celebrate the 56th anniversary of his party.
Images circulated on social media depicting the incidents in Sanza Pombo, which also resulted in injuries and the vandalism of the municipal station Rádio Nacional de Angola (RNA).
At the time, the provincial secretary of UNITA in Uíje, Félix Simão Lucas, presented photographs that portrayed the clashes, with some injuries and material damage, referring that the MPLA overlapped the UNITA act, previously communicated to the authorities.
Last March, the MPLA attributed responsibility for the clashes to UNITA, stating that this was always its behavior.
"A picture is worth a thousand words. This has always been the behavior of UNITA gentlemen. Look at the history and see whose behavior this is. The videos are more than evident", replied MPLA spokesman Rui Falcão , to Lusa, urged to comment on the UNITA version.
