Killer convicted in absentia for murder of Congolese political exiles

Fourteen years after the bullet-riddled bodies of two Congolese political exiles were discovered near Lyon, one of three men suspected of ordering their murder was last night found guilty.

But Benoît Chatel was nowhere to be seen as the judge handed him a 20-year prison sentence. The Belgian-Congolese businessman, who has previous convictions for fraud, vanished in 2012.

The victims were understood to have been plotting to assassinate the Democratic  Republic of Congo’s President Laurent Kabila when they themselves were killed.

During the case, much of which was heard behind closed doors, Gérard Martinez, the former head of France’s intelligence service, testified that his operatives had “nothing to do” with the murder. Although intelligence officials had been in contact with Chatel, Mr Martinez heaped scorn on Chatel’s claims that they had been following the victims.

Alain Deverini, an interior designer from Monaco and the only of the three suspects present in the dock yesterday, was acquitted. The verdict on a third man, Chatel’s suspected accomplice Domenico Cocco, was postponed due to his lawyer’s ill health.

The bodies of Philémon Naluhwindja Mukuba and Aimé-Noël Atembina were found in the back seat of a charred Renault Scenic in a cornfield by a motorway in 2000. The corpses were so burnt that DNA tests were required to establish their identities. Atembina served as a military captain under Congo’s despotic President Mobutu before Kabila’s rebel militia forced him into exile in 1997. The court in Grenoble revealed he was probably not the intended victim.

Mukuba, the son of a militia chief, had been suspected of pocketing $5m (£3.2m) from the state mining company he ran under Kabila before fleeing to Belgium. A witness claimed he had sought funding from al-Qaeda in return for Congolese uranium rods. There is no evidence the sale was made.

The pair were lured to Lyon under the false promise of funds for arms from Chatel, who had made a name for himself in diamond trading and telecommunications in the DRC. It was his “interesting address book” that had led France’s intelligence service to question him on the DRC’s political landscape.

Waiting for the pair at Lyon’s station instead, the court heard, it was claimed, was Cocco, an Italian formerly wanted on charges of drug-trafficking and pimping, with two North African hitmen who have never been found. Chatel is said to be currently living in a town in the south-east of the DRC and French police are pessimistic about the prospects of tracking him down.