The trial and conviction of Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland followed their arrest in May 2009, and their being charged with killing their hired driver, 47-year-old Abedi Kasongo, on May 5, 2009, at Bafwasende, Tshopo District, Orientale Province, Democratic Republic of Congo.
[2] After their arrest, French and Moland were charged with killing Kasongo on the Ituri Road, in the vicinity of the 109-kilometre marker between Kisangani and the Ugandan border.
[2] However, according to Mirna Adjami, a local representative of the International Center for Transitional Justice, only Congolese police and army soldiers can be tried before a military tribunal; this raised questions as to the court's legitimacy.
[11] In 2006, he was admitted to the Telemark Battalion, a Norwegian Army mechanised infantry unit, but was allegedly forced to resign in 2007 as he and his friend Moland were accused of having recruited military personnel into employment with private security companies.
[12] Moland also has a Norwegian Army background, having served in The King's Guard and later the Telemark Battalion, where he held the rank of second lieutenant before his resignation in 2007.
French and Moland were also involved in security missions in various African countries, such as Angola, Sierra Leone, and lately in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The employee badges were from a little-known security company named Special Interventions Group (SIG) which is owned by and mostly staffed by Norwegians [citation needed].
The investigators also found SIG-Uganda employee ID badges which bore the identical SIG logo and the false names of "John Hunt" and "Mike Callan" accompanying French and Moland's respective photographs.
[27] The case has been widely covered in the Norwegian media, which has described much of the evidence presented against French and Moland as "contradictory and seemingly absurd", such as the case with a photo of Rune Folkedal, a photographer in Drammens Tidende, a Norwegian regional newspaper, wearing a beret and pointing at Africa, in which Folkedal is named as French's and Moland's commander for their claimed operation in the Congo.
The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported a former political advisor to the UN peace mission to the Congo (MONUC) as saying that it appeared evidence existed for the charges and that the trial was procedurally correct.
[30] After Moland's death in 2013, The Washington Post said that Reprieve has "sharply criticized the conviction of the two, pointing out there was no physical evidence against the men and that two people were paid to testify against them.
[32] The case was discussed again as part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo–Norway relations during meetings on April 1, 2011, and the following day between Gunvor Alida Endresen (Minister Counsellor at Norway's embassy in Angola) and authorities in Kinshasa.