MATTHEW TOSTEVIN, Freetown | Saturday 6.00pm.
ANOTHER 180 of the UN peacekeepers held hostage in Sierra Leone have been released, leaving only about 70 still in the hands of Foday Sankoh’s rebels, Liberia’s government said.
A United Nations spokesman in Freetown confirmed the arrival in Liberia’s capital of 46 hostages, who were among almost 500 seized by the rebels when a 1999 accord to end eight years of civil war collapsed three weeks ago.
Thirty UN peacekeepers, all Zambians and former hostages of Sierra Leonean rebels, arrived on Saturday in the Liberian capital by helicopter from the border town of Foya.
The latest arrivals brought to 76 the number of hostages airlifted to Monrovia since Friday evening.
The United Nations said Friday night that a ”significant number” of hostages had been freed.
Liberian President Charles Taylor, who has close ties to Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front, has been trying to negotiate freedom for the hostages.
Government officials in Freetown said the releases could be timed to coincide with this weekend’s 25th anniversary meeting of leaders of the Economic Community of West African States in Nigeria, where Sierra Leone will also be discussed.
Sierra Leone’s President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah said on Friday that Sankoh, who has been detained at a secret location since May 17, would be put on trial soon.
Although Sankoh benefitted from an amnesty under the 1999 peace deal, Kabbah’s spokesman said the case was being built on evidence of atrocities committed since then and of a plot against the government.
A motley array of loyalist factions has driven the rebels back up the main axis leading from Freetown to RUF heartlands in the north and the east, where the diamonds that have helped fuel the war are mined. — Reuters, AFP