An investigation by Jeune Afrique, earlier inquiry records and testimony at the Martinez Zogo trial have raised questions about whether resources and information from Cameroon’s intelligence service were used to advance the private interests of businessman and media owner Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga.
By MMI News
For more than three years, the murder of journalist Martinez Zogo has exposed parts of a relationship that would ordinarily remain hidden from public view: the connections between powerful private individuals and some of the officers entrusted with Cameroon’s most sensitive intelligence operations.
Now, allegations published by Jeune Afrique, read alongside evidence already discussed before the Yaoundé Military Court, are raising a wider question.
Was Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga, the businessman behind the L’Anecdote media group and Vision 4 television, receiving intelligence gathered through Cameroon’s state security apparatus for purposes extending beyond the Martinez Zogo affair?
A Jeune Afrique investigation published on September 18, 2026 alleged that Lieutenant-Colonel Justin Danwe, the former director of operations at the General Directorate for External Research, DGRE, leaked information while serving inside the intelligence agency.
According to the investigation, Danwe supplied surveillance information to influential people outside the service and maintained close relations with Amougou Belinga, who allegedly benefited from DGRE resources to monitor ministers and other senior state officials.
Jeune Afrique further alleged that information obtained through those channels could be used to exert pressure and strengthen relationships with powerful figures at home and abroad.
The magazine named Togolese leader Faure Gnassingbé, Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra when describing Amougou Belinga’s foreign relationships. The published material does not establish that any of those leaders knew of, requested or participated in the alleged intelligence activity.
The allegations remain allegations. No court has established that Amougou Belinga operated a private intelligence network or used confidential information to influence the foreign leaders named by Jeune Afrique.
But other material already before the public record gives the story a deeper foundation.
Amougou Belinga had previously acknowledged receiving information from Danwe
The relationship between the businessman and the intelligence officer did not emerge for the first time in Jeune Afrique’s September investigation.
In 2023, the magazine reported on a lengthy investigation file prepared after the kidnapping and killing of Martinez Zogo. Accounts of the inquiry said Amougou Belinga acknowledged meeting Danwe several times.
More significantly, the businessman was reported as saying that Danwe provided him with information concerning the border with the Central African Republic and that the intelligence was useful to his business interests.
According to the account of his deposition, Amougou Belinga said Danwe would come to his office, provide information and receive small amounts of financial assistance, which the businessman described as help with transport and other needs.
The same investigation record said Amougou Belinga acknowledged receiving information from Danwe concerning foreign countries where he had business interests or was considering investments.
Those statements do not prove that classified material was unlawfully handed over, nor do they establish the scale or sensitivity of the information involved.
They do, however, establish something significant: according to the reported contents of his own deposition, Amougou Belinga did not deny that an intelligence officer gave him information that assisted his private business activities.
That relationship has since taken on greater significance as evidence has emerged during the Martinez Zogo trial.
Court hears allegation that the Ministry of Finance was monitored
On June 1, 2026, Professor Georges Bell Bitjoka appeared before the Yaoundé Military Court as a digital-forensics expert in the Martinez Zogo case.
His testimony concerned data recovered from electronic devices belonging to several people connected to the investigation.
According to courtroom reporting, Bell Bitjoka told the tribunal that between December 2021 and 2022, Amougou Belinga allegedly asked Danwe to monitor Cameroon’s Ministry of Finance and report information back to him.
That allegation is particularly important because it moves the story beyond informal conversations about regional security or business conditions.
The Ministry of Finance is one of the institutions with which Amougou Belinga’s businesses had significant dealings and disputes.
Earlier investigation records examined during the Martinez Zogo case referred to a tax dispute involving companies within the L’Anecdote group and a tax reassessment of about 10.9 billion CFA francs.
Those same records show that Danwe was communicating separately with Modeste Mopa Fatoing, then a senior tax official who had headed Cameroon’s Directorate General of Taxation.
The existence of those relationships does not by itself establish wrongdoing by Mopa or prove that information obtained from the Ministry of Finance was unlawfully supplied to Amougou Belinga.
But the court testimony raises a direct question that goes beyond the Zogo murder case: whether a senior DGRE officer was being asked to use intelligence capabilities to obtain information concerning a government ministry for a private businessman.
Deleted communications and what the digital evidence actually shows
The digital evidence introduced at the Martinez Zogo trial has also established substantial communication between Danwe and Amougou Belinga.
Bell Bitjoka testified that investigators found traces of numerous communications between the two men around the period of Martinez Zogo’s abduction and death.
Court reports said the forensic examination identified 26 audio calls and one video call, while WhatsApp communications had been deleted. Investigators also relied on information obtained from the telephone of Amougou Belinga’s secretary to identify a contact believed to have been used for exchanges between the businessman and Danwe.
The expert also discussed location data that placed Danwe in areas associated with Amougou Belinga during the period under examination.
But one part of Bell Bitjoka’s testimony is just as important as the incriminating interpretation placed on some of the data.
According to Legal237’s account of the hearing, the expert said his examination of the available communications did not itself establish a link between Amougou Belinga and the killing of Martinez Zogo.
Another court report said the devices belonging to Amougou Belinga that were made available for examination yielded no specific material directly establishing such involvement.
That distinction matters.
The existence of calls, deleted messages and meetings can form part of an evidential picture, but their meaning remains contested. The prosecution, defence and ultimately the court may draw different conclusions from them.
Amougou Belinga has denied ordering or participating in the kidnapping, torture or killing of Martinez Zogo.
A missing telephone remains central to the case
Investigators have also spent considerable time trying to locate a telephone attributed to Amougou Belinga.
The device returned to the centre of the trial in September and October.
Lieutenant-Colonel Dieudonné Bialo, head of the gendarmerie’s Central Judicial Investigations Service and the prosecution’s 35th witness, told the court that investigators had tried to trace the device after it stopped registering on telecommunications networks.
According to accounts of his testimony, both the SIM card and the handset’s IMEI identifier stopped transmitting.
The telephone is significant because Danwe had previously alleged that he transferred a video connected to the operation against Martinez Zogo to Amougou Belinga.
An earlier investigation report said Amougou Belinga’s secretary confirmed that Danwe visited his office and that an exchange of video material took place, although she said she did not know what the video contained.
The phone investigators wanted to examine was never recovered.
The court has therefore been left with traces of communications and testimony about what may have passed between the two men, but without access to an important device that investigators believed could clarify the relationship.
How the intelligence allegations intersect with the Martinez Zogo case
Martinez Zogo was abducted in Yaoundé on January 17, 2023. His badly mutilated body was found several days later.
Before his death, the Amplitude FM journalist had repeatedly discussed alleged corruption and public expenditure on his popular programme, Embouteillage. He had publicly criticised Amougou Belinga and questioned payments from the state treasury that allegedly benefited the businessman.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says Zogo had told another journalist shortly before his disappearance that he had received threats. CPJ also documented his reporting on allegations involving powerful government and business figures.
The investigation into his killing eventually brought some of the country’s senior intelligence figures into court.
Danwe has acknowledged organising an operation against Zogo, although his accounts of who authorised it and what its intended outcome was have changed during the investigation and trial.
Reporters Without Borders said in 2023 that Danwe told the organisation he had organised an operation intended to intimidate the journalist and alleged that he acted on Amougou Belinga’s instructions.
Danwe has given different accounts at different stages about the chain of command.
During hearings in September 2026, he argued that he had received instructions concerning Martinez Zogo before meeting Amougou Belinga and called on his former DGRE superior, Léopold Maxime Eko Eko, to accept what Danwe described as his own share of responsibility.
Those remain Danwe’s claims, and the court has yet to determine which version, if any, is supported by the wider evidence.
What Amougou Belinga is actually charged with
The distinction between allegation and charge is particularly important in this case.
Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga is one of 17 defendants sent for trial in connection with the events surrounding Martinez Zogo’s abduction, torture and death.
According to the case record reviewed by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the charges against Amougou Belinga were ultimately framed as complicity in co-perpetration of torture.
Danwe faces broader charges, including complicity in co-perpetration of arrest and kidnapping, torture and murder, as well as violation of instructions.
The defendants pleaded not guilty.
Describing Amougou Belinga as being tried for an alleged role in the Martinez Zogo killing is therefore broadly accurate in explaining the case, but saying that he has been convicted of murder, or that the court has already established that he ordered the killing, would go beyond the present legal position.
No judgment has yet established his guilt.
Defence challenges the investigation
The trial remains fiercely contested.
During hearings on October 12 and 13, lawyers questioned Lieutenant-Colonel Bialo over the investigation, including telephone tracing, how he became part of the mixed investigative commission and the circumstances under which Amougou Belinga’s name entered the inquiry.
Bialo told the court that he was not the original director of the investigation and said he had joined the commission after replacing another officer. Defence lawyers questioned why his name was absent from the original list of commission members.
During the October 13 hearing, Bialo also said that it was former DGRE director Eko Eko who first mentioned Amougou Belinga during the investigation, rather than investigators independently beginning with the businessman.
These exchanges form part of the defence effort to challenge how evidence was obtained and how the accusations developed.
They do not resolve the separate allegation that Danwe previously provided information to Amougou Belinga or the testimony that the businessman allegedly asked him to monitor the Ministry of Finance.
A bigger question about Cameroon’s intelligence service
This is where the September Jeune Afrique investigation becomes particularly significant.
Its central allegation is not simply that one intelligence officer knew one businessman.
It describes a system in which confidential reports, surveillance information and intelligence material could allegedly leave the DGRE and become tools in political and commercial struggles.
The magazine portrayed an intelligence service fractured by competing power centres and internal rivalries, where information could become a commodity rather than remain restricted to national-security purposes.
Those broader claims have not been tested and established in court.
But parts of the relationship at the centre of the investigation are already documented elsewhere.
Amougou Belinga was reported as acknowledging that Danwe supplied him with information useful to his business interests.
A digital-forensics expert has testified that Amougou Belinga allegedly asked Danwe to monitor the Ministry of Finance.
The court has heard evidence of extensive communication between the two men.
Investigators have also examined deleted communications and searched unsuccessfully for a telephone they considered potentially important to the Martinez Zogo investigation.
None of those facts, taken individually or together, proves the full case advanced by Jeune Afrique.
They do, however, leave questions that extend beyond the guilt or innocence of the defendants in the Martinez Zogo trial.
Who authorised the collection of intelligence allegedly supplied to private individuals?
What information was shared?
Were DGRE personnel using state surveillance capabilities for purposes unrelated to national security?
Did senior officials know?
And what safeguards existed to prevent intelligence gathered by the state from being used in private commercial or political disputes?
Those questions have acquired new weight because they are no longer based solely on anonymous accounts about the workings of Cameroon’s intelligence community.
Versions of them now appear in investigation records, defendants’ statements and testimony heard in open court.
For a case that began with the brutal killing of a journalist, the trial is increasingly revealing something much wider: how intelligence, private power, business interests and state institutions may have intersected behind closed doors.
The Yaoundé Military Court has yet to deliver its judgment in the Martinez Zogo case.
Until it does, allegations concerning criminal responsibility remain unproven and the defendants retain the presumption of innocence.
But regardless of the eventual verdict, the evidence and allegations that have emerged have opened another issue that Cameroon may still have to confront: whether some of the country’s most sensitive state intelligence capabilities were available to people they were never intended to serve.
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