The trial of a suspected warlord accused of atrocities during Liberia’s civil war has started in Finland.
The development comes not long after France and Switzerland putting two other rebel commanders in the dock in December.
The 51-year-old Gibril Ealoghima Massaquoi was allegedly known as “Angel Gabriel” when he was a commander in the notorious Sierra Leone rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which also fought in Liberia.
The AFP news agency reports it has seen court documents which contend he held an “extremely senior and influential position” in the RUF, one of the main militias fighting alongside President Charles Taylor’s NPFL forces in Liberia.
According to witnesses, he ordered civilians, including children, to be locked inside two buildings, which were then set on fire.
In another alleged atrocity, Prosecutor Tom Laitinen says some of his victims’ bodies were cut up and “made into food which Massaquoi also ate”.
He denies the charges however and says he was taking part in peace talks at the time of the alleged crimes.
Prosecutors have demanded a life sentence, which, in Finland tends to mean 14 years’ imprisonment, reports AFP.
The first Liberian civil war started in December 1989 when Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front (NPFL) launched a rebellion to overthrow the authoritarian president Samuel Doe, who had murdered the country’s previous leader in a bloody coup.
Taylor quickly took control of most of the country excluding the capital, Monrovia, where an African force was present. The capital later fell and he was elected president in 1997, but within two years another rebellion erupted and he lost much of the country. At the end of the in 2003, Taylor flew to Nigeria.
At least a quarter of a million people perished in the decade and a half of chaos, with a third of the country’s population turned into refugees.
Two years ago ex-warlord Mohammed “Jungle Jabbah” Jabateh was jailed for 30 years in the US for lying about his past as a leader of a force that carried out multiple murders and acts of cannibalism.
Another former warlord Alieu Kosiah went on trial in Switzerland in December, becoming the first Liberian to face prosecution for war crimes over the atrocities committed in the country.
Kunti Kamara, another former rebel commander, was also ordered to stand trial in France accused of torture and complicity in acts of torture in the 1990s.
Over 250,000 people were killed in the Liberian conflict, which was intertwined with the war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
