The main Senegalese opponent Ousmane Sonko was confronted on Tuesday, before an investigating judge of the Dakar court, with the one who accuses him of rape, a case very followed in the country, lawyers from both camps told the press.
At the end of a seven-hour hearing that began around 11 a.m. (GMT and local time) at the Dakar courthouse, before the investigating judge Oumar Maham Diallo, each side accused the other of having refused to answer questions, according to their statements to the press.
An important security device had been deployed throughout the city, especially around the court.
The questioning of Ousmane Sonko and then his arrest in March 2021 had contributed to triggering several days of riots, looting and destruction, which had left at least a dozen dead.
Mr. Sonko, 48, declared candidate for the 2024 presidential election, was charged with rape and death threats and placed under judicial supervision in March 2021, after being targeted in February 2021 by Adji Sarr’s complaint, an employee of a beauty salon where he was going to get a massage.
“It was not a confrontation, it was a massacre,” Mr. Sonko briefly commented on private Dakaractu television after the hearing, outside his home in Dakar.
“I was a little disappointed. I expected a confrontation” but “he (Sonko) refused to speak. I did not recognize Ousmane (Sonko). He did not respond to the dean of the judges, to the lawyers and the prosecutor. I answered their questions,” Adji Sarr told the press in court.
“It is up to them (the plaintiffs) to provide evidence of the rape charges. They gave no evidence. She (the accuser Adji Sarr) used her right not to answer the lawyers’ questions. The dismissal is necessary” in this case, told the press a lawyer for Sonko, Henri Gomis, in court after the hearing.
“Ousmane Sonko refused to answer the questions of the prosecution and the lawyers. At the bar of the court, the evidence will come out”, for his part indicated to the press El Hadji Diouf, a lawyer for Adji Sarr, in allusion to a possible lawsuit.
Mr. Sonko denounces a “plot” to torpedo his candidacy for the presidency of 2024. The camp of President Macky Sall refutes any instrumentalization of justice.
Ousmane Sonko, third in the 2019 presidential election, holds a speech that is at once sovereignist, pan-Africanist and social, slaying the elites and corruption. He also pounded the economic and political influence exerted according to him by the former French colonial power and the multinationals.
President Macky Sall, elected in 2012 for seven years and re-elected in 2019 for five years, remains silent on his intentions to run for president in 2024.