INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT VERDICT
Bemba guilty of bribing witnesses
The Hague — Judges on Wednesday sentenced former Democratic Republic of the Congo vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba to a year in jail and fined him €300,000 for bribing witnesses during his war crimes trial in an unprecedented case at the International Criminal Court (ICC). "The chamber imposes on you an additional 12 months, one year, imprisonment," presiding judge Bertram Schmitt told Bemba, adding a "substantial fine" was necessary "to discourage this kind of behaviour". Prosecutors had asked for eight years for Bemba, who is already serving 18 years after being convicted of war crimes by his marauding troops, whom he sent into the Central African Republic in 2002-03 to put down a coup against the then president. Found guilty in 2016 of bribery, the verdict and sentence are the first of their kind in the history of the ICC. Bemba was found guilty in October of masterminding a network to bribe and manipulate at least 14 key witnesses, and had "planned, authorised, and approved the ...
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