FREETOWN, Sierra Leone
Allieu Kondewa, a militia leader accused of hacking civilians to death and other crimes during Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s has been released after serving his prison sentence, a court in the West African nation said.
The Residual Special Court for
Sierra Leone, based in Freetown, said Monday that Kondewa (pictured above with white cap) was the second person
convicted by the court to be released, after the CDF's "War
Commander" Moinina Fofana was released in 2018 after completing a 15-year
sentence.
Kondewa was a leader of the
pro-government Civil Defense Forces (CDF), a notorious paramilitary unit that
recruited traditional hunters to fight rebels during the country's brutal
1991-2002 civil war.
He was convicted in 2007 to a
20-year sentence on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity,
including murder, issuing collective punishment and recruiting child soldiers.
He spent nearly 10 years in
prison in Rwanda under a special agreement as war-ravaged Sierra Leone did not
have proper detention facilities.
The Residual Special Court for
Sierra Leone, based in Freetown, said Monday that Kondewa was the second person
convicted by the court to be released, after the CDF's "War
Commander" Moinina Fofana was released in 2018 after completing a 15-year
sentence.
Kondewa had been imprisoned in
Rwanda until 2018, since Sierra Leone did not have sufficient detention
facilities to hold him.
That year the court granted a
conditional early release for him to serve the remainder of his sentence in his
community in the southern Sierra Leone city of Bo, under strict oversight.
The Sierra Leone civil war,
financed largely by so-called blood diamonds, left 120,000 people dead and tens
of thousands mutilated.
As a parallel force to the
regular army, the CDF fought rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and
the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.
The CDF was alleged to have
"eliminated" civilians suspected of collaborating with rebels, either
through shooting them, hacking them to death or burning them alive.
Several other people remain in
prison after being sentenced to longer prison terms by the special court,
including Charles Taylor, the former Liberian warlord convicted of stoking the
conflict.
Taylor is currently serving a
50-year sentence in a British prison after being convicted in 2012 by a special
court in The Hague over war crimes in Sierra Leone -- the first ex-head of
state to be jailed by an international court since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg
in Germany after World War II.
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