South Sudan’s 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’s office had been given an old photo and wrongly believed it showed the death in custody of Luka Gathok Nyuon.
The opposition had previously identified Nyuon as a bodyguard to the opposition leader and ex-vice president Riek Machar.
“It 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,” opposition SPLA-IO party spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel said in a statement, without giving details on the bodyguard’s current circumstances.
The statement on X said Nyuon “passed on in detention in Juba.”
The government of President Salva Kiir has locked up dozens of opposition members in recent months, accusing them of fomenting violence.
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.
Machar, Kiir’s 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.
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.
His supporters accused the government of locking up more than 100 “officials and officers” from Machar’s entourage “under very harsh conditions including torture, starvation and denial of medical care.”
South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has suffered chronic instability since it became independent from Sudan in 2011.
