\n A court in Finland on Tuesday ordered suspected warlord Gibril Massaquoi to go on trial on appeal for alleged atrocities in Liberia's civil war, months after his acquittal.\n<\/p>\n
\n The fresh trial will open in the Finnish city of Turku, about 170 kilometres (106 miles) west of Helsinki, on January 10 and will subsequently move to Liberia and Sierra Leone to hear witness testimony, before returning to Finland.\n<\/p>\n
\n Massaquoi, who moved to Finland in 2008, is accused of atrocities that include rape, ritual murders and the recruitment of child soldiers.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The main trial will start in Turku in January 2023 and will continue in Liberia for about two months from the beginning of February,\" Turku Court of Appeal said.\n<\/p>\n
\n A Finnish district court acquitted Massaquoi last April, saying that the prosecution had \"not proven with sufficient certainty\" that he had been involved in the alleged crimes in the later years of Liberia's second war, which ended in 2003.\n<\/p>\n
\n Finnish prosecutors appealed the verdict to the appeals' court.\n<\/p>\n
\n Massaquoi was formerly a senior commander of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a Sierra Leonean rebel group that fought in Liberia.\n<\/p>\n
\n He denies all the charges and was arrested in Finland in 2020 after a rights group investigated his war record. Massaquoi says he was not in Liberia when the alleged offences took place.\n<\/p>\n
\n The Turku appeals court said it would hear from witnesses in Liberia in February and in May from witnesses in Sierra Leone, before returning to Finland by June 5.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We will try our best to change the decision,\" prosecutor Tom Laitinen told AFP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A court in Finland on Tuesday ordered suspected warlord Gibril Massaquoi to go on trial on appeal for alleged atrocities in Liberia's civil war, months after his acquittal. The fresh trial will open in the Finnish city of Turku, about 170 kilometres (106 miles) west of Helsinki, on January 10 and will subsequently move to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-110622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n