20100627
reuters

Congo's top rights campaigner was buried to anti-government chants on Saturday as authorities came under pressure to explain the death this month of Floribert Chebeya after he was summoned to a police appointment.

Several hundred riot police accompanied Chebeya's coffin to a cemetery in west Kinshasa after a night vigil attended by up to 4,000 supporters in a municipal sports stadium of the city.

Opposition supporters chanted accusations that President Joseph Kabila's government was implicated in killing Chebeya, found dead in his car in the Kinshasa suburbs on June 2.

The government has suspended national police chief John Numbi to facilitate the inquiry and allowed Dutch pathologists to conduct an autopsy. The attorney-general has described the inquiry as a murder investigation, but the cause of death has still not be made public.

"It is time for a law protecting not just human rights workers but all Congolese," opposition deputy Jean Lucien Bussa said of arbitrary killings and torture of political dissidents in the country against which Chebeya had long spoken out.

The funeral comes just four days before Congo hosts the king of former colonial power Belgian and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for a 50th anniversary independence jubilee.