The international campaign group, Human Rights Watch has called on the authorities in Sierra Leone to start criminal investigations against an alleged former RUF arms supplier and aide to war criminal, Charles Taylor.
Ibrahim Bah who also goes by the name Ibrahim Baldeh is a Senegalese national who has been on a United Nations travel ban since 2004.
Assistant Inspector General of Sierra Leone Police for Crime Services confirmed to Politico that someone with the name Ibrahim Beldeh was in their custody. Morie Lengor would not confirm when or how he was taken in, saying only that he had denied being the man on the UN watch list. He said they had contacted the international police agency, INTERPOL, to provide them with a photo of the fugitive to match with the man in their custody. A local campaign group, Centre for Accountability and Rule of Law (CARL) who had first called for Ibrahim to be tried, expressed shock that the Sierra Leone Police would wait this long to confirm whether the man being held is indeed the man that was wanted. CARL Executive Director, Ibrahim Tommy said the photo of the fugitive was so clear on the INTERPOL website that the police only needed to go online to verify whether the man being held was the same person being sought by the UN. Human Rights Watch says that if prosecutions are opened, Ibrahim would be “Sierra Leone's first purely domestic prosecution in relation to war crimes or crimes against humanity committed during its 11-year armed conflict, which ended in 2002”. Ibrahim allegedly provided arms and materiel to the rebel RUF, according to a United Nations panel of experts who reported to the Security Council in May this year. The fugitive had been thought to be living in Burkina Faso, but the UN panel reported that he had in fact been living in Sierra Leone since 2008 at 31 Herbert Street in Aberdeen with a Senegalese passport No. A00349903. He was believed to have attempted to recruit mercenaries to fight in Cote D'Ivoire and illicit minerals trafficking.
