A Finnish court on Friday acquitted a 52-year-old former Sierra Leonean rebel tried for war crimes during Liberia’s civil war, after a trial marked by an unprecedented relocation to Liberian soil.
The court in Pirkanmaa, in the southwest of the Nordic country, found that the prosecution had not “proved with sufficient certainty” that he was involved in the rapes, murders and recruitment of child soldiers for which he was being prosecuted.
In its judgment, the Tampere-based court also considered that “the defense had demonstrated that it was probable that the accused was not in Liberia at the time the crimes were committed”, between 1999 and 2003.
Nicknamed “Angel Gabriel” according to witnesses, Gibril Massaquoi was then a senior official of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a Sierra Leonean armed group led by Corporal Foday Sankoh, close to the former Liberian warlord who became President, Charles Taylor.
He had been arrested in Finland in 2020, where he has lived in exile since 2008, after the mobilization of the NGO Civitas Maxima which is trying to bring those responsible for the civil war to trial.
Asked by AFP, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Tom Laitinen, said he had not yet made his decision on a possible appeal of the judgment, which is more than 800 pages long.
According to his lawyer, the accused is “extremely relieved”. “We will now wait a month to see what the prosecutor will decide,” said Kaarle Gummerus.
The Finnish court moved to Liberia in early 2021, a first in a country where no court has so far tried the crimes committed during the civil wars of 1989-1996 and 1999-2003.
These wars, among the most terrible that Africa has ever known, were marked by abuses of all kinds. They caused 250,000 deaths, leaving one of the poorest countries on the planet devastated.
Questioned in the Liberian capital Monrovia, the civil rights activist Adama Dempster preferred to remember that a trial could take place.
“Those who committed horrible crimes during the war, this tells them that they will have their place before justice,” he said.
During his trial, marked by the difficulty in establishing the evidence and doubts about certain testimonies, Gibril Massaquoi had rejected all the charges.
Fragility of testimonies
He pleaded that he was not in Liberia at the time of the events – in particular because he was in Sierra Leone under UN house arrest – and that his last visit to the country dated back to June 2001.
After the end of the hearings in January, he was released the following month by the Finnish justice, on the grounds of too long pre-trial detention, pending the judgment where he faced life imprisonment.
Once a teacher, he was allowed to move to Finland after testifying in 2003 before the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) set up by the UN. He had then received immunity for acts committed in his country, but not in Liberia.
The relocation – without Massaquoi remaining at the time in his prison in Finland – had made it possible to hear witnesses on the spot, to remote villages on the borders of Liberia and Sierra Leone.
During the weeks of hearings – under high protection – in Liberia and Sierra Leone, witnesses had delivered chilling accounts, one of them accusing Massaquoi of having drunk the blood of a victim with a severed neck.
His defense, however, questioned the validity of the charges, pointing out the vagueness of the witnesses.
According to the judgment, the court established that the defendant “was not the person referred to as the ‘Angel Gabriel’ by witnesses”.
Like the Finnish case, a few trials have taken place or are pending in Switzerland or France, but many personalities involved in the conflict still occupy important economic and political positions in Liberia.
In June 2021, former Liberian rebel commander Alieu Kosiah was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court, becoming the first Liberian to be convicted of war crimes committed during the conflict in his country.
“I hope others will be brought to justice,” Natasha Wilson, who was eight when two of her brothers were killed in the war, told AFP in Monrovia.