THE HAGUE, Netherlands
A lawyer for an alleged
extremist accused of involvement in crimes including rape and torture in the
northern Malian city of Timbuktu a decade ago rejected the allegations and said
Monday that he was just a police officer carrying out court orders who could
have been killed for disobeying.
Prosecutors at the
International Criminal Court had argued that the defendant, Al Hassan Ag Abdoul
Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, was a “key figure” in a reign of terror after
al-Qaida-linked rebels overran the Malian desert city in 2012.
But defense counsel Melinda
Taylor said Al Hassan was merely a member of the Islamic police force, at a
time when the Malian authorities were in disarray, who was “obliged to respect
and execute the decisions of the Islamic tribunal. This is what the police
around the world do.”
Taylor said that had he
disobeyed the court orders, he would “have risked being branded a traitor and a
spy,” and might have been executed. Any attempt to flee Mali would have put his
family at risk, she said.
Al Hassan, who sat in court
wearing a white headscarf, is charged with involvement in crimes including
rape, torture, persecution, enforced marriages and sexual slavery committed
from April 2012 until the end of January 2013.
He allegedly was a key member
of Ansar Dine, an Islamic extremist group linked to al-Qaida that held power in
northern Mali at the time. A French-led military operation in 2013 forced the
group from power, but rebel elements have continued to stage attacks on Malian
and international forces.
The trial is the second case
at the ICC linked to Ansar Dine’s brutal occupation of Timbuktu. A member of
the group, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, was convicted in 2016 and sentenced to nine
years’ imprisonment for attacking nine mausoleums and a mosque door in the city
in 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment