"He betrayed the task assigned to him by the citizens of the Comoros," said prosecutor Ali Mohamed Junaid, demanding a life sentence for the former President.

The former president of the Comoros, Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, who was on trial for high treason before the state security court, was sentenced to life imprisonment, the president of the court announced.

The decisions of this special court are not subject to appeal. The 64-year-old Sambi appeared briefly on the first day of his trial last week to denounce a procedure he considers unfair, and then missed the rest of the hearings.

"He (Sambi) was sentenced to life imprisonment and stripped of his political and civil rights," i.e. his right to vote and hold public office, said the head of the court, Omar Ben Ali, during the reading of the verdict, adding, "the court orders the confiscation of his property and assets for the benefit of the public treasury.

Sambi appeared briefly on the first day of his trial last week to denounce the measure. "The formation of the court is illegal, and I do not want to be tried before this court,"he said at the time.

And Sambi, the most prominent opponent of the current president Ghazali Osmani, is accused of involvement in the scandal of the "economic citizenship"program. The former President (2006-2011) passed a law in 2008 allowing the sale of passports at a high price to those seeking citizenship.

The program, under which tens of thousands of "Bedoun" from the Gulf countries, who are considered second-class citizens in their homeland and are deprived of identity documents, was used as a way to fill the state treasury.

Sambi was accused of embezzling a fortune under this program. The losses to the government as a result amounted to more than 1,8 billion euros, according to the prosecutor, more than the GDP of the small, poor archipelago located in the Indian Ocean.

"They have given evildoers the right to sell Comorian citizenship as we sell peanuts,"said one of the lawyers for the Civil Party, Eric Emmanuel Sousa.

But French defense lawyer Jean-Gilles Halimi said "no trace of these funds was found and no account was discovered".

Sambi was originally on trial for corruption. In September, the facts were reclassified as high treason, a crime that, according to Halimi, "does not exist in the law of the Comoros".

"The court will have to define a legal concept" for such a charge, he added.

Government official Daniel Ali Bandar said that " راض " because the trial went "peacefully". But he is waiting"for the follow-up in the civil court because, in addition to the prison sentence, the Comorians want to know the fate of the millions of euros that were embezzled".

Among the other defendants in this case is the French-Syrian businessman Bashar Kiwan, who was sentenced to ten years in prison. The Comoros judiciary issued an international arrest warrant against him.

Also, former Vice-President Mohamed Ali soylhi was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Thanks to his absence from the trial, he was granted permission to travel in October.