Comoros leader urged to allow ex-president seek treatment abroad

Former Comorian President Ahmed Abdallah Sambi (2nd R), escorted by Gendarmes, arrives at the courthouse in Moroni on November 21, 2022. [AFP]

Six former prime ministers of the Indian Ocean nation of Comoros have urged President Azali Assoumani to allow his jailed predecessor to seek medical attention abroad.

Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, aged 67 and the head of state from 2006 to 2011, has been under house arrest for eight years.

He was handed a life sentence in 2022 for high treason related to the sale of passports to stateless people, after a trial that critics labelled a "judicial charade".

"The former president is seeing his health deteriorate worryingly," the ex-prime ministers wrote in a letter dated May 26 and seen by AFP Friday.

It asked Assoumani to show "clemency" and allow Sambi to "travel abroad to receive the appropriate care required by his condition, with all the guarantees of return that the justice deems necessary."

Details of Sambi's health have not been released but the public prosecutor's office said this week that tests did not find that he was in a "critical situation likely to be life-threatening".

Sambi's own doctor said this was "false" and investigations were continuing.

Assoumani, a former army chief of staff, took power in a 1999 military coup, one of several to have rocked the three-island nation since independence from France in 1975.

He was elected in 2002 and returned to power in 2006, being re-elected in 2016, 2019 and again in 2024, when the polls were disputed and followed by deadly protests.

Critics accuse the 67-year-old of growing authoritarianism at the head of the country of some 970,000 people situated off Mozambique.