20120515
AFP
A Swedish professional hunter and 10 members of his safari firm have been charged with murder after 13 miners were found dead in the Central African Republic, police said Monday.

Erik Mararv, who heads the big game Central African Wildlife Adventures company, and the 10 employees, several of them foreigners, "were charged with murder on Thursday and remanded in custody in Bangui's central N'garagba prison where they were being held," a police official told AFP.

They were initially detained last month in Bakuma and Bangassu and then taken to the capital Bangui.

The bodies of the 13 miners who had been working in Ngungunza were discovered on March 29.

Photos of the dead men showed them to have been bound with their hands behind their backs and beaten or stabbed to death, police had earlier said.

"The inquiry that followed the discovery of the 13 corpses in the Ngungunza mining worksite ... was carried out with utmost discretion with a view to gathering a maximum of evidence likely to lead to the truth," the official said.