Moland and French

For the past weeks and months the Norwegian press and public have been following a case of two Norwegians arrested for murder in the DR Congo. Tjostolv Moland and Joshua French, two twentysomething Norwegian soldier-of-fortune types, were traveling through the countryside when their Congolese driver was shot and killed.
When the Norwegian press heard about the arrests, there was a lot of indignant outrage at first until it began to become apparent that there was a fair body of evidence to indicate that Moland and French weren't exactly choirboys. They were traveling with fake IDs and weapons, and their excuse for being where they were -- to set up a tourist business in wartorn DR Congo -- seems, well, unlikely. Particularly damning is a picture one took of the other apparently grinning at the camera while washing the dead driver's blood out of the front seat.
Whether or not Moland and French murdered the driver, the trial was a farce and each of them received five death sentences. The Congolese have made much out of the pair's Norwegian military IDs and claimed that this proves they were in the country spying for Norway. A picture of a Norwegian press photographer in a British army beret was described as damning proof, a picture of their Norwegian commander detailing their mission to subvert DR Congo.
This charge of Norwegian espionage has been used by the Congolese to try to shake down the Norwegian government for astronomical sums of money. The prosecutor demanded that Norway pay $600 BILLION dollars restitution, roughly $130,000 per Norwegian man, woman and child, for the damage done to DR Congo by these Norwegian insurgents. This claim was reduced to ca. $60 million dollars in the court's final judgment; the Norwegian government says it won't pay anything, but it seems that if Norway wants Moland and French back, they'll have to pull out the checkbook, and in the meantime DR Congo will keep the two as hostages.
I don't particularly want these two back and don't think it's the Norwegian government's role to give in to blackmail to recover two of its citizens who it seems at the very least were up to some odd funny business in a war zone. Just because the trial was in a kangaroo court doesn't mean the verdict was necessarily the wrong one.

Here's CNN's take on the story, for those of you who don't read Norwegian.