Prosecutors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) said on Tuesday that they would seek the death penalty for 50 people allegedly involved in a coup attempt in May, including three American citizens.
The botched coup attempt was conducted on the morning of Sunday, May 19, 2024, under the direction of an obscure Congolese opposition figure named Christian Malanga.
According to the DRC military, the would-be putschists attacked the homes of President Felix Tshisekedi and Economy Minister Vital Kamerhe in the capital city of Kinshasa. They allegedly had plans to attack the homes of other officials, as well, but one of their intended targets was not home when the coup came calling, and their hit squad got lost while looking for another minister’s house.
Malanga, 41, was one of six people killed during the failed coup. Security forces shot him to death while he attempted to livestream the coup on social media.
Malanga was a naturalized American citizen who moved to Utah in 1999, accumulating a sizable rap sheet of firearm and domestic violence offenses in his youth. He formed a political movement opposed to the sitting DRC government, which he considered a “dictatorship,” and eventually pronounced himself president-in-exile of “New Zaire.”
Malanga accumulated both money and political influence during his years in the United States, and he eventually decided he had enough of both to overthrow the DRC government by recruiting a small band of insurrectionists — including his 21-year-old son, Marcel, to the great dismay of his mother.
Marcel Malanga was a promising high school athlete. One of the men recruited for the DRC coup attempt was a former high school football colleague named Tyler Thompson Jr., also 21 years old. Some of Marcel’s other former teammates said he contacted them and offered to pay them up to $100,000 each to work on a “security job” in the Congo.
Thompson’s family says he was duped into thinking he was taking a vacation to South Africa and Eswatini, not joining a violent coup attempt.
Tyler Thompson Jr. addresses the court in Kinshasa on June 7, 2024, accused of a role in the attempted coup in the DRC, which little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga led, in which six people were killed. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi)
“We are stunned and heartbroken by the videos we have seen from the coup attempt,” his stepmother, Miranda Thompson, said in May after the DRC took him into custody.
“He is a good kid, a hard worker, and a respectful young man. We’re so lost as to how he ended up in this mess,” she said.
The third American facing the death penalty alongside Marcel Malanga and Tyler Thompson Jr. is Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, a 36-year-old acquaintance of Christian Malanga who met the eccentric businessman while he was pursuing a gold-mining venture in Mozambique in 2022.
Zalman-Polun’s previous notable brush with the law was pleading guilty to marijuana trafficking in California in 2015. DRC court records described him as a graduate of the University of Colorado and a former commodity trader, courier, and Uber driver.
Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun sits in court in Kinshasa on June 7, 2024, accused of a role in the attempted coup in the DRC, which little-known opposition figure Christian Malanga led, in which six people were killed. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi)
As with Thompson, Zalman-Polun claimed he was tricked into participating in Malanga’s coup. Marcel Malanga pointed out during the trial that neither he nor the other Americans speak the languages commonly used in the DRC, so they were plausibly confused by the events taking place around them.
Congolese prosecutors initially asked for leniency in Zalman-Polun’s sentencing because he cooperated with their investigation, but, on Tuesday, military prosecutor Lt. Col. Innocent Radjabu urged the judges to sentence all 50 defendants to death, with the exception of one defendant who ostensibly suffers from “psychological problems.”
The death penalty was outlawed in the DRC until March 2024, when the government reinstated it to deal with a surge of attacks from deadly militant groups, such as the M23 rebels. All of the Malanga defendants have been charged with offenses including terrorism and murder that could be punished by death under the new rules.
Some of the other defendants are foreign nationals, notably including Belgian-Congolese political researcher Jean-Jacques Wondo, who has done work for Human Rights Watch (HRW). When the coup trial began in June, the HRW said the only link it could find between Wondo and Malanga was a single old photograph in which they both appeared.
The Biden-Harris administration had no immediate response to the prospect of three American citizens being executed by the DRC. President Joe Biden spent the day relaxing at the beach in Delaware during his second consecutive week of vacation. His public schedule for the coming week is entirely blank.
