10 June 2026 :
Nearly nine years after the killing of two United Nations experts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country's High Military Court on June 5, 2026 delivered its final verdict. All 54 defendants charged in the murder of American investigator Michael Sharp and Swedish-Chilean expert Zaida Catalan have been sentenced to death.
The pair were killed in March 2017 while investigating violence in Central Kasai. According to the court, they were intercepted, accused of being traitors, and executed after being led into a trap.
Among those convicted is Congolese army officer Colonel Jean de Dieu Mambweni. Initially sentenced to ten years in prison, he was handed the death penalty on appeal after judges concluded he played a key role in luring the UN experts to their deaths.
While the ruling closes one of Congo's most high-profile cases, critics say justice remains incomplete.
The National Human Rights Commission argues that senior figures suspected of masterminding the killings were never prosecuted.
Catalan’s sister, Elizabeth Morseby, welcomed the court’s finding that there had been a conspiracy. “This confirms that Zaida and Michael were not simply victims of a random act of violence,” she said. But she said justice remained incomplete, pointing to recordings presented in court attributed to Mambweni in which he allegedly expressed concern that the U.N. experts could incriminate authorities and expose efforts to conceal mass graves.
The two experts were part of a UN fact-finding mission into human rights violations in the Kasai province, which was then rocked by violent clashes between security forces and the Kamwina Nsapu militia group.
