LUANDA: An Angolan teenager who has been in prison for two months awaiting trial for insulting President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has started a hunger strike to pressure authorities into releasing him, his lawyer said yesterday.
Nito Alves, 17, was arrested on September 12 for printing slogans on T-shirts which prosecutors say insulted Dos Santos, Africa’s second longest-serving leader after Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.
One of the slogans called the president “a disgusting dictator” and the other was a quote from a local journalist about war being necessary and urgent in Angola to bring democracy.
“The hunger strike worries us as the situation in the jails is not good and there are many problems, especially regarding medical assistance, so he will suffer,” Salvador Freire Santos, one of Alves’s lawyers, told Reuters.
Alves is a member of a youth movement that has held several protests since March 2011 calling for Dos Santos to resign after 34 years at the helm of Africa’s No 2 oil producer. REUTERS
