Former Burundi president Pierre Buyoya and his wife ordered the killing of a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official in Burundi and should be brought to trial, a defence lawyer told a court on Thursday.
The Burundian and Ivorian governments should ask for a WHO report on the killing to be made public, said Bernard Maingain, a Belgian lawyer for three of the people charged with the murder of the WHO representative to Burundi, Kassi Manlan, who was from Côte d’Ivoire.
Neither Buyoya nor his wife was immediately available for comment.
Manlan, who had represented the WHO in Burundi for just three months, was found dead on November 20 2001 by fishermen on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in Bujumbura.
Police had been searching for him after he was reported missing the same day.
Fourteen people have been charged with Manlan’s killing, including a former police chief and Manlan’s assistant.
The Geneva-based WHO confirmed an internal investigation was conducted after the murder.
”There was an internal investigation in the past but the contents of that report were not made public,” said Christine McNab, WHO spokesperson in Geneva. ”We did not make it public for obvious reasons — we wanted to respect the integrity of the trial.”
The WHO has no plans to make the report public while the case is still before the court, McNab added. — Sapa-AP