CPJ finds flaws, inconsistencies in murder conviction of Senegalese journalist René Capain Bassène

In spite of the Senegalese gendarmerie officer holding a gun held to his head, Ibou Sané held firm. He refused the officer’s order to admit that he knew René Capain Bassène – but in the end it didn’t matter.

Testimony he insisted he never gave was used in court to help convict Bassène, a well-known local journalist, for the 2018 massacre of 14 loggers shot to death in the Bayotte Forest in the southern Casamance area of Senegal.

Bassène was arrested eight days after the murders, and in 2022 was sentenced to life in prison for complicity in murder, attempted murder, and criminal association – crimes that witnesses told CPJ he couldn’t have committed.

In late 2024, CPJ’s review of court documents and interviews with Bassène, his co-accused, and witnesses found that the investigation into the journalist was severely flawed. Several who were subsequently acquitted told CPJ that they were forced to implicate the journalist or sign inaccurate interview records. CPJ also found that the investigation relied on inconsistent evidence regarding Bassène’s whereabouts on the day of the killings and reasons to doubt the authenticity of emails purportedly sent by him. Bassène said he was mistreated in custody; medical documents describe an injury to his ear as a result of “trauma.”

According to Sané, secretary of the southern Senegalese village of Toubacouta in Casamance’s main city of Ziguinchor, the only time he had ever spoken to Bassène was when Bassène called him on the day of the massacre to ask for information about the killings. At the time, Bassène was close to finishing his fourth book on the conflict between Senegalese government forces and the separatist Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC). One appeal court upheld his sentence in 2024; a second appeal against his conviction is currently with Senegal’s Supreme Court.

CPJ’s investigation also found new information linking Bassène’s imprisonment to his work, with court documents showing that prosecutors cited Bassène’s reporting activities, including phone calls and emails, before and after the killings in arguments for his conviction. These details led to his inclusion as the only Senegalese journalist in CPJ’s 2024 census of media members jailed around the world. Senegal, which elected a new reform-promising president and parliament in 2024, was listed among the top five jailers of journalists in Africa in CPJ’s 2023 census.

Threatened for his work

Bassène had dedicated most of his 20-year career to covering the conflict between the Senegalese government and the MFDC, which has sought an independent territory in Casamance since 1982. His interest began in college, when he wrote a thesis on people displaced by the fighting. He published his first book in 2013 on the late rebel leader Abbé Augustin Diamacoune Senghor. Bassène planned on calling his fourth book “A Conflict that Feeds More than it Kills,” and it would have detailed how certain people profited from the fighting, including local leaders, peace-negotiating NGOs, and the traffickers of illegal timber. Bassène had a reputation for dogged reporting, covering all sides of the conflict and traveling to rebel-held areas for his research. “My principle has always been to go and get information from the source,” he told CPJ in one of several phone interviews from prison between September to December 2024.

“It was a rather explosive book in which he mentioned organizations by name and evoked the problem of wood cutting,” Xavier Diatta, a friend of Bassène, told CPJ.

Bassène knew that his reporting came with risks. In the foreword to his third book, published in January 2017, he recalled receiving threats from fighters on both sides and being labeled by critics “as a rebel, or as a spy in the pay of the State of Senegal or the MFDC.”  Bassene’s wife, Odette Victorine Coly, told CPJ, “he was no longer taking calls from numbers he didn’t know because he was receiving so many threats.” In September 2017, Bassène told Diatta in a message reviewed by CPJ, “I am finishing my research by May [2018] to end my work on the crisis and focus on my family because I am also being threatened.”

Bassène wasn’t the only journalist under scrutiny for covering the rebel movement. In 2005, authorities arrested the entire staff of the private radio station Sud FM in the capital, Dakar, and detained its correspondent Ibrahima Gassama in Ziguinchor for interviewing the rebel leader of an MFDC faction. Other journalists have also been expelled or intimidated for reporting on a conflict that has killed thousands of people and remains a sensitive issue in Senegal.

Violence in the forest

By the end of 2017, Bassène had begun to worry about the risk of increased violence associated with illegal logging in the forest, which both authorities and rebels had profited from over the years. A local faction of the MFDC had promised to “take care of protecting Casamance’s natural resources,” accusing the Senegalese authorities of encouraging the “squandering” of the forest. The group’s armed wing “Atika,” meanwhile, said it would “crack down on any woodcutter who ventures into the Boffa Bayotte forest.” The statements followed the arrest in November 2017 by Senegalese authorities of four residents of Toubacouta, who were members of an independent inter-village committee for the protection of the forest, following an altercation with illegal loggers.

“[The MFDC] statements were becoming more and more threatening,” Bassène told CPJ, adding that armed men often attacked loggers in the forest and that 10 people were killed in 2011.

Before the massacre, Bassène shared his concern that violence in the forest could escalate with several people close to the government, including Diatta, an adviser to the late Senegalese prime minister Mahammed Boun Abdallah Dionne, Bachir Ba, then regional director of national public broadcaster RTS, and Jean-Marie François Biagui, a former MFDC secretary general turned civilian who remained active in Senegalese politics, the three told CPJ in interviews. Diatta said that he informed the gendarmerie about Bassène’s warnings when he was held over his links to the journalist and questioned for three days following the killings. But Bassène’s efforts are not mentioned in court documents.

Bassène has remained behind bars since his 2018 arrest by masked gendarmes, who scaled the walls of his home. Virtually all of the 25 other co-accused have been acquitted. CPJ traveled nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) south from Senegal’s capital, Dakar, to villages in the area, including Toubacouta and Bourofaye Diola, to speak to some of the defendants and others close to the case. Seven of the co-accused told CPJ that while the prosecution presented them as his accomplices, they were interrogated under duress and authorities attributed false testimonies to them.

Alleged meetings

During the trial, the prosecution alleged that Bassène planned the killings, accusing him of involvement in two meetings with villagers and village representatives held on December 22, 2017, and January 3, 2018. At these meetings, authorities alleged that Bassène promised that he would “manage” the forest problem by calling on the rebels to defend the forest. A third meeting was also allegedly held in Bassène’s absence on January 5, 2018, during which the massacre was said to have been coordinated according to his plans. But nine of the alleged participants in these meetings told CPJ that they were unaware of any such gatherings and had never heard Bassène say such things.

Those people – Maurice Badji, an uncle of Bassène and chief of the village of Bourofaye Diola, Ibou Sané, Abdou Sané, Jean Christophe Diatta, Abdoulaye Diédhiou, Abdou Karim Sagna, Alassane Badji, Alphousseyni Badji, Dou Sagna – also told CPJ they had been forced by the authorities to sign transcripts of interviews with them that had been altered to include inaccurate information. All but three – Maurice Badji, Dou Sagna, and Abdou Sané – said they had never met Bassène. According to the court documents, four additional defendants – Papya Sané, Nfally Diémé, Cheikh Oumar Diédhiou, and Lansana Badji – said that they never participated in the alleged meetings.

Another defendant, Jean Baptiste Badji, said in an interrogation he had heard Bassène at one of the meetings saying that “blood is going to flow,” but retracted his testimony in court. Jean Baptiste Badji died after the trial. “In prison, when I asked Jean why he said those false things, he cried and said he was afraid, and gendarmes brutalized him,” Dou Sagna told CPJ.

Conflicting evidence

According to court documents, the gendarmerie claimed Bassène’s phone was geolocated in the Boffa Bayotte forest, alongside the phones belonging to several of his co-defendants. But CPJ spoke to four people who said they were with Bassène in the Kandialang neighborhood of Ziguinchor at the time of the killings. Coly, Bassène’s wife, and two others from the area who asked not to be named for safety reasons confirmed that they had seen Bassène and spoken with him on the afternoon of January 6, 2018, which is when the massacre is said to have occurred. Alain Diédhiou, the journalist’s neighbor, told CPJ he was with Bassène at a local football game at that time.

Bassène told CPJ that he learned about the tragedy on the radio while he was at the football field with Diédhiou and then had several phone calls with MFDC members to try to find out what happened. Those calls would later be used to support accusations that he planned and instigated the killings.

‘Incriminating’ phone calls

The journalist told CPJ that he began researching the murders by making phone calls the moment he learned about it. “An event of this magnitude could not fail to feature in this book, especially as I had been following the case before the massacre,” he told CPJ. One call was to César Atoute Badiate, the leader of the local MFDC faction, who was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for complicity with Bassène. “I asked him if his men were involved and apparently he didn’t know about it yet, he had promised to come back to me,” Bassène said. The prosecution also cited Bassène’s call after the killings with Oumar Ampoi Bodian, an MFDC representative who was convicted for complicity in the murders and then acquitted on appeal in August 2024. Bodian told CPJ that he had called the journalist, assuming Bassène would be on the ground investigating.

According to the prosecution, these calls were made as part of Bassène’s participation in the killings, but transcripts of the calls were never produced in court despite the requests of the journalist’s legal team.

False testimony under duress

Court documents from the trial reveal a striking pattern: defendants in the case repeatedly and vigorously contested statements attributed to them in the minutes of their interrogations and insisted they had “made confessions” after being subjected to “acts of torture” without the presence of a lawyer. In addition to Sané, who was interrogated at gunpoint, at least four other defendants in the case told CPJ they were violently interrogated about Bassène’s alleged involvement in the killings, and that false testimony attributed to them about Bassène was later introduced in the trial.

Abdou Karim Sagna, a resident of Toubacouta and one of Bassène’s main co-defendants who was described as the executor of the killings and later acquitted, told CPJ he did not know Bassène before his detention. Sagna described his arrest and the search of his home, which was carried out in the middle of the night by armed and masked gendarmes. He also said officers asked him about Bassène and the case as they slapped and hit him, subjected him to humiliating verbal and physical harassment, and shocked him with an electric baton. “We were called one by one only to be forced to sign and then referred to the prosecutor’s office without knowing the content of the interrogation minutes,” Sagna said.

Jean Christophe, another defendant, told CPJ that he was punched and subjected to other mistreatment while officers asked him if he was in the forest with Bassène on the day of the killings. He said he told the officers that he did not know Bassène, but his testimony had been changed when presented during the trial. Two others, brothers Alassane and Alphousseyni Badji, told CPJ that authorities also violently interrogated them and misrepresented their testimony in court.

Brutal interrogations

Bassène also faced brutal treatment, he told CPJ. After his arrest, gendarmes delayed his interrogation for four days, claiming he was “still lucid” or not sufficiently exhausted to divulge keyinformation during questioning. Bassène was held naked, handcuffed at his feet and hands for those four days, Yama Diédhiou, another suspect in the case, who saw the journalist in detention, told CPJ.

When the interrogation finally began, the blows came swift and fast. “They beat me constantly, stripped me naked and applied an electric baton to my genitals when they didn’t like my answers,” Bassène said. “When they paused the interrogation during the night, a gendarme made sure…that I was not sleeping by knocking on the door every time I dozed off.” Both Diédhiou and Omar Sané, arrested in a separate case and held with Bassène, said that instead of a jail cell, the journalist was kept in a toilet stall with no light, infested with mosquitos and other insects.

Bassène said that when he refused to “sign an autograph” on the minutes of the investigation, one of the gendarmes slapped him, causing his right ear to bleed. After complaining of pain and hearing loss, Bassène was seen by a doctor in 2019 and treated for “perforation of the right eardrum following a trauma,” according to medical documents reviewed by CPJ. Those documents also confirm the loss of hearing in his right ear and severe deterioration in eyesight, which Bassène says was due to the tight bandage that was forced over his face for nearly a day after his arrest. Bassène also said he was denied access to a lawyer during the interrogation, though he obtained one later in court.

In December 2024, CPJ submitted a letter to the Senegalese gendarmerie requesting comment on the conditions of Bassène’s interrogation, but did not receive a response. In January 2025, gendarmes called Bassène’s wife in order to interview her on the allegations of torture, she told CPJ.

Questionable emails

As part of its case, the prosecution also alleged that Bassène was a member of the MFDC communications team and sent about 21 emails in that capacity to Ousmane Tamba, an exiled member of MFDC’s political wing who owns the news website Journal du Pays and is close to MFDC leader Badiate.

Bassène told CPJ that his last email discussion with Tamba was when he was writing his second book, published in 2015, documenting the origin of the conflict. Tamba declined to respond to CPJ’s written request for comment, sent via Bodian, the MFDC’s representative, saying in November 2024 that he was “not involved in any way” in the case.

In one of the emails in the court file, it appeared that Bassène had identified himself as part of the MFDC’s team in written responses to questions from Journal du Pays about the conflict, which were dated December 4, 2017. CPJ, using the digital archiving tool Wayback Machine, found that the interview was published at least three months earlier and cited Bassène as a journalist, writer, and observer of the conflict.

Journal du Pays told CPJ via its official email address in 2018 that Bassène was an experienced journalist and specialist on the Casamance conflict who gave “dozens of interviews” to their outlet.

Bassène denied sending the emails and being a member of the MFDC communications team. In court, Bassène’s legal team also questioned the authenticity of an email that was addressed only to “@/” and another allegedly sent in February 2018, a month after Bassène was detained without access to phone or email.

Ciré Clédor Ly, one of Bassène’s lawyers in the case said in an interview with local media that Bassène – who was forced to give authorities access to his email account – repeatedly requested an expert opinion on whether the messages had come directly from his account. The court refused.

In the Ziguinchor prison, where he spends his days reading, writing, and assisting the nurses to care for other inmates, Bassène waits for his appeal to the Supreme Court to be considered.

“I’m ready to spend my life in prison, but what I can’t stand is the injustice of being told that I wasn’t arrested because of my work as a journalist,” he said.