According to officials, Cherubin Okende was found dead on Thursday, his corpse covered in gunshot wounds.
Official sources state that a former government minister in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was discovered deceased on Thursday.
A day after he went missing, the body of Cherubin Okende, a former spokesperson for the nation’s political opposition, was found shot to death in his car in Kinshasa, the capital.
According to DRC Communications Minister Patrick Muyaya, the news of Okende’s “assassination” was received by the government with “horror.”
“While condemning this heinous act, [President Felix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo] instructed all security services to diligently carry out a thorough investigation in order to shed light on this unacceptable act,” he said.
Up until December of last year, when he quit to join the opposition group Ensemble pour la Republique and take on the role of spokesperson, Okende, 61, was the government’s transport minister.
He was supposed to appear before the DRC Constitutional Court questioning his disclosure of assets when he left his ministerial duties, according to local media.
His relatives informed the media that he left for court on Wednesday to ask for the hearing to be postponed but never came back.
The head of Okende’s party, Moise Katumbi, who plans to run for president in December, thinks his colleague was abducted inside the court’s boundaries.
Asserting that it was “a political assassination,” Katumbi told the French radio station RFI that the nation had “returned to a regime of terror.”
Prior to elections on December 20, in which the country’s president, Felix Tshilombo, who has been in office since 2019, is standing for a second five-year term, political unrest is reportedly on the rise in the DRC.
A fresh independent and open audit of the nation’s electoral register has been demanded in protests coordinated by groupings of presidential contenders.
Following a violent opposition march in late May, Salomon Kalonda, Katumbi’s advisor, was detained and accused with compromising state security.
