Appearing before Senior Principal Magistrate Teresa Nyangena, Onyango denied the charge and urged the court to release him on bond, maintaining that the case was intended to frustrate his activism.

The commission chairman Mohamed Chande Othman said the number of deaths was likely to be higher, because some families buried their loved ones without taking their bodies to morgues

Nearly a year after his death in South Africa, Lungu’s remains are still unburied, the subject of a macabre fight between his family and the long-time rival who succeeded him.