Former Liberian president Charles Taylor has been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by a special tribunal in The Hague.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone ruled Thursday that Taylor aided and abetted severe human rights abuses carried out by rebels during Sierra Leone's civil war.
Presiding Judge Richard Lussick said Taylor was guilty on all 11 counts of an indictment that included charges of murder, rape, sexual slavery, recruitment of child soldiers, and enslavement.
Taylor is the first head of state to be convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trial in 1946 of Karl Doenitz, who briefly ruled Nazi Germany after the death of Adolf Hitler.
Lussick said Taylor will be sentenced on May 30. Taylor had pleaded not guilty to the charges and has the right to appeal the verdict.
Prosecutors had said Taylor masterminded Sierra Leone's civil war in the 1990s, arming and assisting Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front rebels in exchange for “blood diamonds,” mined in eastern Sierra Leone.
The court found Taylor did not have command and control of the rebels but was aware of their activities and provided them with weapons and other supplies.
Taylor was arrested and handed over to the court in 2006, three years after his indictment and subsequent resignation as president. The trial, which opened in 2007, was transferred from Freetown to The Hague amid regional security concerns.
During the trial, the court heard testimony from 94 prosecution witnesses and 21 defense witnesses, including Taylor.
The tribunal was established to try the most serious cases of war crimes rising from the Sierra Leone conflict. The Taylor case is expected to be the court's last major trial. VoA.
Taylor was elected to the Liberian Presidency after the first Civil War there on the motto "You killed my Pa, You killed my Ma, I'll vote for you!" He recruited child soldiers as a rebel by killing the adult of multiple villages and conscripting pre-teens into his force.
His forces were known for betting on the sex of a child in the womb and then cutting the woman open to settle the bet. Taylor has not been charged with any of the crimes he committed in Liberia, nor have any others. He has only been charged with those his forces committed in Sierra Leone.
After 15 years of atrocities and civil war, Charles Taylor voluntarily gave up power with the threat of force from the United States in 2003, when George Bush declared "Charles Taylor, you must go," backed up by two ships of Marines parked off the Liberian Coast.
Charles Taylor had been arrested in the 1990's in Maryland on request of Liberian President Samuel Doe but had escaped from the jail, fled to Libya, where he and his rebels were trained by Moamar Qaddaffi. At the time of his arrest, he was charged with fraud, corruption, and misuse of government property, as the head of the Liberian General Services Administration.
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