Verdict of Murder

When the Congo's martyr-demagogue. Patrice Lumumba, died last winter deep inside Katanga, territory of his bitter political foes, the Katangese Minister of the Interior said: "If people accuse us of killing Lumumba, I will reply, 'Prove it.' " For six months, a U.N. Commission of Investigation* has been trying to prove it. Its report last week, based largely on hearsay, hunches and gossip, did not furnish proof, but added considerable evidence to show that Lumumba was indeed murdered in cold blood--and probably with the connivance of Moise Tshombe's own Katanga government.

The report discredits the Katanga story that Lumumba was killed by indignant tribesmen after he escaped from a farmhouse jail. One witness quoted by the commission swore that Tshombe's Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo himself, confronting the prisoner in Elisabethville, took the bayonet from a soldier's rifle and plunged it into Lumumba's chest, then let a Belgian officer named Ruvs finish off the victim with a bullet in the head. The body was then supposedly taken to a refrigerator in a nearby laboratory and later buried at a still undisclosed place. But in a different version, the evidence points to another Belgian, one Colonel Huyghe, as the killer. A Briton serving with the Katanga army at the time testified that Huyghe later boasted of how Lumumba's two fellow prisoners were shot as they knelt to pray. Then Huyghe waited for Patrice himself to enter the room. Testified the Briton: "When Lumumba walked in, he started screaming and crying for his life . . . 'Pray, you bastard,' said Huyghe. 'You had no pity on women or children or nuns of your own faith, so pray!'" At this, goes the testimony, Lumumba fell to the floor, started rolling and screaming for mercy, and Huyghe then shot him.

Although noting that the details of the story should be treated with caution, the U.N. commission concluded that the prisoners were murdered on Jan. 17, in all probability "in the presence of Tshombe and Munongo." Moreover, said the report, blame for the crime must be shared by Congolese Central Government President Joseph Kasavubu, who handed Lumumba over to Tshombe in the first place.

In Elisabethville last week, Tshombe angrily denied all the charges, pointed out that the report had been put together in faraway Geneva. Asked Tshombe: "Why didn't the commission come to Katanga?" The commissioners had tried, but the Congo Government refused to let them in.

*Burma's Justice Aung Rhine, Togo's Ayite d'Almeida, Ethiopia's Ato Tashoma Hailemariam, Mexico's Dr. Salvador Martinez de Alva.

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