The verdict in the trial of Thomas Kwoyelo, a former commander of the Lord's Resistance Army militia accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, will be delivered on July, a Ugandan court said Thursday.
He is being tried by the International Crimes Division (ICD) of the high court in northern Gulu in what is regarded as the first war crimes trial in Uganda.
Kwoyelo faces 78 counts and is accused of brutal civilian murders during a 20-year conflict in northern Uganda.
Believed to be in his fifties, he has denied all claims against him.
"The defence counsel Caleb Alaka has closed the defence hearing in the Thomas Kwoyelo case and judgement has been fixed for 12th July," the court communications officer Sheila Wamboga told AFP Thursday.
Kwoyelo is not among the top LRA commanders, some of whom -- including rebel supremo and former altar boy Joseph Kony -- are wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for rape, slavery, mutilation, murder and forcibly recruiting child soldiers.
The LRA was founded in Uganda in the 1980s with the aim of establishing a regime based on the Ten Commandments.
Kwoyelo joined the militia in 1987, and was arrested in March 2009 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during a sweep by regional forces against LRA rebels who had fled from Uganda two years earlier.
He was put on trial in July 2011 before the ICD, but was released two months later on the orders of the Supreme Court which said he should be released on the same grounds as other fighters who were granted amnesty after surrendering.
The prosecution appealed the decision and he went on trial again last month.
- Driven out of Uganda -
According to court documents, "all attacks by the LRA which took place in Kilak County, Amuru District between 1987 and 2005, the subject of charges in this indictment, were either commanded by him or were carried out with his full knowledge and authority."
His lawyer Caleb Alaka told AFP Kwoyelo "has been consistent that he is innocent and looking forward to the court ruling".
After the LRA was driven out of Uganda, it spread across the forests of the DRC, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Sudan.
In 2021, Dominic Ongwen, a Ugandan child soldier who became a top LRA commander, was sentenced by the ICC to 25 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The civil war effectively ended in 2006 when a peace process was launched, but the LRA's founder Kony has evaded capture.