According to Tanzania Daily News, Sambi, who is a political nemesis of incumbent President Azali Assoumani, was sentenced by the State Security Court, a special judicial body whose rulings cannot be appealed, after he was convicted of selling passports to stateless people living in the Gulf.
“He betrayed the mission entrusted to him by the Comorians,” public prosecutor Ali Mohamed Djounaid accused in the court as he requested for a life sentence.
Sambi, 64, who led the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago nation between 2006 and 2011, enacted a law in 2008 allowing the sale of passport for high fees.
The controversial scheme was aimed to give nationality to the so-called Bidoon – an Arab minority numbering in tens of thousands who cannot obtain citizenship.
According to Djounaid, the former president embezzled a whopping $1.8 billion under the fraudulent scheme – more than the gross domestic product of the impoverished nation.
Local media quoted Emmanuel Sossa, a lawyer for civilian plaintiff as saying: “They gave thugs the right to sell Comorian nationality as if they were selling peanut.”
Sambi’s lawyer Jean- Gilles Halimi, however, refuted the accusations, saying no evidence had been provided for the missing monies or bank accounts had been put forward to suggest a crime.
Sambi refused to attend the trial on the grounds that there were no guarantees he would be judged fairly. He briefly appeared once with his defense asking the judge to recuse himself since he had previously sat on the panel that decided to indict him.
The former leader, who was originally charged for corruption, had already spent four years in prison before he faced a trial. He was previously placed under house arrest for allegedly disturbing public order.
Source: Anadolu Agency