Meurtre à Kinshasa - Qui a tué Laurent-Désiré Kabila ?

In the late morning of January 16th 2001, Laurent Desire Kabila, is murdered in his presidential office by a soldier-kid who had become his bodyguard. We are in the Congo (former Zaire), the very country where four years earlier Kabila had seized power thanks to his army of soldier-kids, putting an end to Mobutu’s dictatorial reign of several decades. A few minutes later, Kabila’s assassin is shot to death as he attempts to escape from the scene of his crime. Later, on his dead body a letter is found signed by the Military Attaché of the American Embassy: “Should there be a problem, call this number”. Many other trails will weave a thick curtain of mystery around this murder, which, to this day, has not yet been solved. Trails, such as the fate of eleven Lebanese citizens, linked to a diamond merchant suspected of having financed the President’s assassination, who are abducted in the Congolese capital and executed on the very evening of Kabila’s murder. This film is an in-depth investigation, centred on key actors – including the current President of Congo, Joseph Kabila, son of the victim – and eyewitnesses of the murder. The inquiry starts in the vastness of the Congolese territory and ends in the Arctic Circle, in Sweden, where the directors were able to locate the presumed accomplice of the murderer. As far as Congolese Justice is concerned, it has condemned, in a grotesque show trial, 135 innocent people, soldiers and civilians, 50 of them are still rotting in the country’s dreadful prisons. A hidden camera passed to one of the convicts in the prison of Makala reveals shattering testimonies, yet offers the gripping start of the investigation. Interviews, never been shown before archival footage of the show trial and of the war in Congo –a war that Kabila had launched against his former ally Rwanda- deliver a incisive insight into an African region that is at the heart of ruthless fights for the control of huge natural resources.