TUESDAY, 3.00PM:
OUSTED Sierra Leonean President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah is reported to have arrived in Nigeria’s federal capital, Abuja, on Monday.
Kabbah, who has been in exile in Conakry, Guinea, since a military junta overthrew his elected government in May last year, is expected to meet Nigerian military ruler General Sani Abacha on Tuesday.
The Nigerian-led Ecomog intervention force defeated the nine-month-old junta in the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown last week.
Meanwhile, Ecomog commander Colonel Mazell Khobe announced the end of a seven-month ban on commercial vessels entering Freetown’s harbour on Monday.
The news was well received by Freetown residents. “[The end of the ban] will mean that rice, the country’s staple food, and other essential commodities will soon be in the market,” a local merchant said. Khobe added that the embargo on the importation of weapons and ammunition will remain in place.
Meanwhile, fleeing soldiers of Sierra Leone’s ousted junta at the weekend raped hospital patients at gunpoint, shooting dead two men who tried to intervene, a missionary reported on Tuesday.
The violence took place when junta forces and their allies in the Revolutionary United Front attacked a hospital in Lunsar, 80km north of the capital Freetown, eventually setting the hospital on fire.
Meanwhile reports from Bo, where junta forces are still fighting, indicate that although rebel troops looted three commercial banks, destroyed the telecommunications network, and damaged the Bo-Kenema power facility serving Eastern Province late on Monday, Nigerian-led Ecomog forces and loyalist Kamjor militias are gaining ground.