PARIS, France: A French court Wednesday sentenced former Liberian rebel commander Kunti Kamara to a 30-year jail for violence against civilians and complicity in crimes against humanity during Liberia’s first civil war.
Kamara, now 49, had been sentenced to life in jail during a first trial here in 2022. Today’s revised sentence follows an appeals trial that lasted for three weeks.
The Paris criminal court upheld a guilty verdict against the rebel commander for crimes against civilians between 1993 and 1994, including a teacher whose heart he reportedly chewed.
Kamara was also found guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity for not preventing soldiers under his command from repeatedly raping two teenage girls back in 1994.
The prosecution had Monday urged the trial court to uphold his life imprisonment.
Kamara faced the allegations dating back to the early years of the conflicts that killed 250,000 people in the West African nation between 1989 and 2003.
The fighting was marked by rape, mass murders and mutilations, in many cases by child soldiers conscripted by warlords, with atrocities against civilians common.
The United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), a rebel group had fought the National Patriotic Front of ex-president Charles Taylor with Kamara leading as a regional commander of the Movement.
Camara’s case was first brought after his arrest in France in 2018 by the Crimes Against Humanity Division of the Paris Criminal Court.
It was set up in 2012 to try suspected perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide detained on French soil, regardless of where the alleged crimes were committed.
This was the unit’s first case not related to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It was the first case taken by the unit that was not related to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
