A legal source said the man, identified as naturalised Dutch citizen Kunti K., is suspected of being a former commander in the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), which fought during the 1990s.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Arrested on Tuesday in the northeast\u00a0Paris<\/a>\u00a0suburb of Bobigny where he had been hiding out at the home of a friend, he is suspected of torture, murder, slavery, the use of child soldiers and cannibalism between 1993 and 1997.<\/p>\n Liberia<\/a>, Africa’s oldest republic, formed by freed American slaves, was devastated by two civil wars which killed around 250,000 people between 1989 and 2003.<\/p>\n ULIMO was set up to fight a rebel force headed by warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor, who is currently serving a 50-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting rebels who committed atrocities in neighbouring\u00a0Sierra Leone<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kunti K., born in 1974, was detained in a joint operation by elite GIGN police and officers from France’s OCLCH agency, which investigates war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n “He had arrived in France in 2016, after leaving the Netherlands and passing through Belgium,” said Colonel Eric Emeraux, head of the OCLCH.<\/p>\n Paris prosecutors had opened an initial investigation into Kunti K. after victims’ rights group Civitas Maxima filed a criminal complaint on July 23.<\/p>\n Contacted by AFP, the Geneva-based group, which offers legal support to victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity, declined to comment on the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" France has detained a suspected former militant commander from Liberia’s brutal civil war and placed him under formal investigation for crimes against humanity for alleged atrocities including torture and cannibalism, police said Friday. A legal source said the man, identified as naturalised Dutch citizen Kunti K., is suspected of being a former commander in the United Liberation Movement of Liberia… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1919"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1937,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions\/1937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}