Beninese pan-Africanist Kemi Seba, placed in police custody for 48 hours in France this week, was questioned due to suspicions of “links” with the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, we learned on Friday from a source close to the case.
Kemi Seba, 42, was taken into custody on Monday at the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) on suspicion of foreign interference. He was released on Wednesday without prosecution at this stage, but “investigations are continuing”, indicated the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The investigation which led to his custody was launched at the “initiative of the DGSI”, another source close to the case told AFP.
According to his lawyer, Juan Branco, who strongly denounced this custody, Kemi Seba was questioned as part of an investigation opened for “intelligence with a foreign power (…) with a view to provoking hostilities or acts of aggression against France.
Mr. Seba was also questioned on suspicions of “maintaining intelligence with a foreign power (…) likely to harm the fundamental interests of the nation”.
In March 2023, several media, including the digital magazine Sources de Arte/CAPA, the German daily Die Welt and the magazine Jeune Afrique, published the Wagner Leaks, resulting from a hacking of internal documents of the Wagner paramilitary group, created by Evgueni Prigozhin, died in a plane crash in 2023.
According to these documents, the Russian oligarch financed and guided certain actions of Kemi Seba in Africa between 2018 and 2019.
Kemi Seba, whose real name is Stellio Gilles Robert Capo Chichi, is the former leader of the Tribu Ka, a small group which claimed anti-Semitism and advocated a separation between Blacks and Whites before being dissolved by the French government in 2006.
In France, he was convicted several times for inciting racial hatred and stripped of his French nationality in July.
Today at the head of the Pan-Africanist Emergencies group and followed on social networks, since the beginning of August he has had a diplomatic passport from Niger as special advisor to the head of the military regime in power in Niamey, General Abdourahamane Tiani.
In recent years, Kemi Seba has organized or participated in several demonstrations hostile to the CFA franc in Africa, during which he was regularly arrested, expelled or turned back, notably from Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea.
