DRC: arrest of 23 people involved in a "seditious enterprise" in Kinshasa

The Congolese police announced Thursday that they had arrested 23 people in Kinshasa the day before involved in a "seditious" enterprise . She said in a statement to have "dismantled (...) a group of incivic in the Kingabwa district in the municipality of Limete of which twenty-three people were arrested". "The investigation continues to find the rest of the gang and the sponsors of this seditious enterprise, whoever they are and wherever they are", adds this document signed by General Sylvano Kasongo, Kinshasa police chief .

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On social networks, a video presented as being that of the arrest, widely shared, shows police officers on alert retreating while heavy gunfire is heard. Another shows police officers facing dozens of men seated on the ground. In the comments, Internet users presented the dismantled group as “a militia” of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), the party of President Felix Tshisekedi. For several weeks, videos have been circulating on social networks of a group presenting itself as the "Peacekeepers who support Fatshi" (Félix Tshisekedi) and composed of people well known in Kinshasa as belonging to the UDPS.

"It is a campaign against the party", reacted to AFP Augustin Kabuya, secretary general of the UDPS. "When we were in the opposition, we had not formed a militia, how can we think that it is today when we are in power that we are going to maintain a militia?" , he continued. “The UDPS is not directly or indirectly concerned,” he insisted. "It's absurd, we think to destabilize the UDPS (...) that the authors of this fable go for treatment". Created in 1982, the UDPS acceded for the first time to the supreme magistracy in January 2019 at the end of the presidential election which proclaimed its leader Felix Tshisekedi the winner.