SWISS TRIAL FOR LIBERIAN REBEL CHIEF ACCUSED OF CANNIBALISM BEGINS

A former rebel commander accused of being involved in the killing of 18 civilians and other crimes that included rape and eating pieces of a school teacher’s heart during Liberia’s civil war appeared in a Swiss court room Thursday.

The trial is just one of a handful of cases brought to international courts in connection with the West African country’s 1989-2003 civil war, which became a byword for savagery and killed hundreds of thousands of people, Emma Farge reported for Reuters.

The defendant, 45-year-old Alieu Kosiah, denies the charges. His lawyer said Kosiah was not present in the area in question when the alleged crimes were committed. Kosiah’s crimes are listed by the Swiss court as “recruitment and use of a child soldier, forced transportation, looting, cruel treatment of civilians, attempted murder, murder (directly or by order), desecration of a corpse and rape.”

Kosiah was one of the so-called ‘big men’ in the rebel faction ULIMO whose battalion fought against the troops of warlord Charles Taylor in the remote Lofa County in the 1990s. The indictment says that he killed or participated in the killing of 18 civilians, forced a displaced woman to be his “wife,” raping her repeatedly, and that he recruited a 12-year-old boy as his personal bodyguard. In one incident described in the indictment, Kosiah joined fighters in eating slices of an assassinated man’s heart off a metal plate. Acts of cannibalism were not uncommon in the conflict.