NAIROBI: South Sudan\u2019s opposition said Saturday it had misidentified a prisoner in a photograph as a bodyguard of its leader who died in custody amid widespread arrests of their supporters.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the opposition said the leader\u2019s office had been given an old photo and wrongly believed it showed the death in custody of Luka Gathok Nyuon.<\/p>\n
The opposition had previously identified Nyuon as a bodyguard to the opposition leader and ex-vice president Riek Machar.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has come to my attention that this photo was in fact taken few years back in Rumbek prison and does not… (show) our fallen comrade,\u201d opposition SPLA-IO party spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel said in a statement, without giving details on the bodyguard\u2019s current circumstances.<\/p>\n
The statement on X said Nyuon \u201cpassed on in detention in Juba.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government of President Salva Kiir has locked up dozens of opposition members in recent months, accusing them of fomenting violence.<\/p>\n
The opposition says Kiir is seeking to consolidate power and has effectively destroyed a 2018 power-sharing deal that ended a devastating five-year civil war in which some 400,000 people died.<\/p>\n
Machar, Kiir\u2019s long-time rival, has been stripped of his position as vice president in the unity government and will appear in court from Monday on charges of treason and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
He is accused of coordinating an attack on a military base by the White Army, a militia group from his ethnic Nuer community, which his party denies.<\/p>\n
His supporters accused the government of locking up more than 100 \u201cofficials and officers\u201d from Machar\u2019s entourage \u201cunder very harsh conditions including torture, starvation and denial of medical care.\u201d<\/p>\n
South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has suffered chronic instability since it became independent from Sudan in 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NAIROBI: South Sudan\u2019s opposition said Saturday it had misidentified a prisoner in a photograph as a bodyguard of its leader who died in custody amid widespread arrests of their supporters. In a statement, the opposition said the leader\u2019s office had been given an old photo and wrongly believed it showed the death in custody of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":87125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87126,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87112\/revisions\/87126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}