A landmark case against a Sierra Leone rebel accused of war crimes during Liberia's bloody conflict resumed in Finland on Tuesday, after the court returned from hearing testimony in Monrovia.
Gibril Massaquoi appeared at Pirkanmaa District Court dressed in a grey woollen sweater and listened through a translator as a defence witness spoke during his trial for rape, ritual murder and recruiting child soldiers during the later years of Liberia's second civil war, which ended in 2003.
Massaquoi denies all charges and claims he was not in Liberia when the alleged offences took place.
A witness, who was granted anonymity by the court, described being holed up with the defendant in a series of safehouses in Sierra Leone between 2002 and 2003 after Massaquoi agreed to become an informant for the prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
"Did Gibril ever leave the safehouse for any reason during your first six months there?" defence counsel Kaarle Gummerus asked.
"If he did, the special court would send security and a car to take him," the witness answered. "The security always had the key to the gate."
Cross-examining, prosecutor Tom Laitinen asked whether it was possible that, before moving to the safehouse, Massaquoi ever travelled to Liberia in order to meet a girlfriend, without the witness's knowledge.
"Yes," the witness said.
Born in 1970, Massaquoi was a senior commander of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a Sierra Leone rebel group that also fought in Liberia.
He moved to Finland in 2008 and was arrested there in March 2020 after a rights group investigated his war record.
In an unprecedented move, the Finnish court decamped to Monrovia between February and April this year, and again in September, to hear witness testimony in the case.
The proceedings were described as historic, as very few people have been tried for war crimes committed in Liberia, and none inside the country itself.
Around a quarter of a million people were killed between 1989 and 2003 in the West African country, in a conflict marked by merciless violence and rape, often carried out by drugged-up child soldiers.
There are regular appeals to establish a war crimes tribunal inside Liberia, a poor nation of five million people where some ex-warlords remain powerful.
President George Weah has resisted the calls, however.
The Finnish court will hear more witnesses, including from the US by video link, over the coming two months, with a verdict likely sometime in the new year, court officials said.