Former Liberian president Charles Taylor funded and armed a rebel leader in neighbouring Sierra Leone, one of his top aides told a United Nations-backed war crimes court on Wednesday. Taylor is on trial for orchestrating rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers during the 1991 to 2002 Sierra Leone civil war.
A blood-diamond expert and an account from a Sierra Leonean miner who said laughing rebels hacked off his hands and burned his family opened the war-crimes trial against Liberia’s Charles Taylor on Monday. The former Liberian president, once one of Africa’s most feared warlords, faces charges of rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers.
The war-crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor, accused of controlling militia that killed and raped thousands in Sierra Leone, resumed on Monday in The Hague after a six month delay. Taylor was present for the hearing in which the prosecution will call its first witness, an international expert on conflict diamonds.