The radical writer, Patrice Nganang, was detained early last month in Yaounde after being accused of threatening President Paul Biya. He is a dual Cameroonian-US citizen but the authorities have seized his African passport.
The prize-winning New York-based novelist was released from jail last Wednesday, and is to be expelled from his native country after being arrested and held on charges of insulting and threatening the president, according to his lawyer.
Dissident writer Patrice Nganang was due to face trial on the 19th of this month after pleading not guilty during an initial hearing last December 15, but he has been taken to the courthouse, in the capital Yaounde, where the state prosecutor asked for his release.
The judge’s agreement with the plea ended the legal proceedings against Nganang and ordering him out of the country, his lawyer, Emmanuel Simh, said. “We can only be very happy, when we have an unlawfully and arbitrarily detained client, to see him released,” Simh declared.
He later stated that officials have kept Nganang’s Cameroonian passport and that he should be put on an afternoon flight to the United States. “According to the government, he is an American who does not have a right to this passport,” Mr. Simh said.
Government spokesman Issa Tchiroma Bakary said Nganang was accused of threatening to shoot President Paul Biya in a Facebook post.
The post was allegedly written after Nganang returned from a visit to the Anglophone West of the largely Francophone country, which has wrestled with the thorny issue of uniting the country’s disparate territories since independence in 1960.
