Former Sierra Leone rebel leader Foday Sankoh died early on Wednesday at a Freetown hospital, said an official at a United Nations (UN)-backed war crimes court where he was facing trial.
The 70-year-old former leader, who was accused of horrific human rights abuses during the 1991-2001 civil war, had been admitted to the Choitram hospital in the Sierra Leone capital after suffering a stroke.
The UN-backed Special Court was set up to prosecute combatants suspected of committing atrocities during Sierra Leone’s civil war, including the rebels of Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
His so-called jungle army of barefoot conscripts, child soldiers and army deserters was notorious for hacking off the limbs of civilians as they razed villages, raping and murdering many in their path.
About 200 000 people are believed to have been killed and many thousands more deliberately mutilated in the conflict.
The court last week rejected an appeal to have Sankoh’s trial halted on health grounds, despite signs that his mental state had been profoundly altered by his stroke last year.
At one hearing last year Sankoh, sporting dreadlocks and sometimes breaking into fits of unexplained laughter, said he was ”surprised that I am being tried because I am the leader of the world”.
At his most recent court appearance on March 15, however, the former rebel leader appeared incapable of speaking at all.
A court doctor said he was partially paralysed and needed psychiatric treatment, describing Sankoh as being in a ”catatonic state”.
The Sierra Leone court has also indicted Charles Taylor, the president of neighbouring Liberia, where rebels are closing in on the capital Monrovia.
Taylor, himself a former rebel leader, supported the RUF and was accused of trading in the so-called ”blood diamonds” they mined. – Sapa-AFP