When Juan Branco bursts in on Sunday, July 30, in the middle of the press conference held by his colleagues from the defense of opponent Ousmane Sonko, even the latter take a moment to understand what is happening. “Nobody was expecting it,” says Me Etienne Dione. After the surprise, unease spreads through the room. The French lawyer speaks, upsetting the previously established order; behind him, Me Ciré Bathily hides his annoyance badly, before being calmed down by his colleagues.
Juan Branco ends his speech, a ten-minute tirade partly devoted to the public prosecutor Abdoul Karim Diop. On Friday, the magistrate had Ousmane Sonko arrested, but he could also have to arrest the lawyer himself. The Senegalese justice system announced on July 14 that it was issuing an international arrest warrant against Juan Branco for “crimes and misdemeanors” in connection with the unrest in early June. ” Here I am. I don’t have the soul of a fugitive, ”says the Frenchman, before being evacuated in a hurry.
Abdoul Karim Diop seems to have immediately responded to the bravado: on the orders of the prosecutor, the police went after Juan Branco, who had become untraceable. All night from Sunday to Monday, the Urban Security and the Criminal Investigations Division (DIC) looked for the lawyer, going in particular to the home of Ousmane Sonko. In vain.
In March, Juan Branco had already tried to enter Senegal, but he had been turned back as soon as he arrived at Dakar airport. This time, he would have landed in Banjul, Gambia, with a Royal Air Maroc flight, then crossed the border by land, according to our information. Before taking the plane, the lawyer took care to leave his phone in Paris. “He left serene, determined to defend Ousmane Sonko. For him, this is his mission. The consequences don’t matter. Now he has to constantly change places so as not to be spotted, ”says those around him.
Hunger-strike
In Senegal, the surprise appearance of Juan Branco in Dakar is seen as an affront by the ruling party. “It’s a monumental bankruptcy [of the intelligence services]. How is it that no agent was stationed at the press conference for Sonko’s lawyers, the day before his referral? », Annoys a member of the presidential coalition.
Juan Branco, for a few moments, stole the show from Ousmane Sonko, who was to be at the center of his lawyers’ speech on Sunday, when a warrant of committal was to be issued against him. The defense of the opponent, prosecuted on seven new counts, judges that his police custody is illegal. The public prosecutor, for his part, assured that this new file had “no connection with the procedure” linked to Adji Sarr. Accused of rape by this employee of a massage parlor, Ousmane Sonko was finally sentenced to two years in prison, in early June, for “corruption of youth”. This sentence casts doubt on his eligibility for the presidential election, scheduled for February 2024.
In detention since Friday, the opponent was to be heard again by an investigating judge on Monday. Several leaders of his party have already called for mobilization, announcing a day under high tension in Dakar. Ousmane Sonko began a hunger strike on Sunday and called on “all political detainees to do the same”. The Ministry of Communication announced in the morning that “due to the dissemination of hateful and subversive messages relayed on social networks in a context of public order disturbances, the mobile data internet is temporarily suspended”.
