A Senegalese opponent, candidate for the 2024 presidential election, was charged and jailed on Friday for “insulting the head of state and spreading false news” after authorities rejected allegations of diamond exploration involving President Macky Sall.
The lawyer Moussa Diop, a former official in the presidential party who then switched to the opposition, is the head of a political coalition.
On December 10, during a press conference in Dakar, he claimed that a famous industrialist had been granted a diamond exploration permit in the north of the country.
He had implicated a former mining minister, Aly Ngouille Ndiaye, a dissident in the presidential party and also a candidate for the 2024 presidential election, in this alleged liberation.
The Senegalese Ministry of Mines, Mr. Ndiaye and the industrialist, who is particularly active in sugar production, had rejected his allegations in separate press releases.
Me Diop was called to the police on December 11 and taken into police custody the same day. “He was detained,” a leader of his party, Cheikh Moussa Fall, told AFP on Friday, confirming information from the Senegalese press.
Mr. Diop will also be prosecuted for “acts or maneuvers likely to endanger public security, defamation, forgery of the state seal, forgery and use of forgeries,” Mr. Sall said.
More than two hundred candidates were registered for the presidential election. President Macky Sall, elected to a seven-year term in 2012 and re-elected to a five-year term in 2019, is not running for re-election.
The submission of candidacies to the Constitutional Council is scheduled for December 12th to 26th.