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Congo-Kinshasa: Opposition Leader Faces War Crimes Charges
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3 July 2008
Posted to the web 3 July 2008
The former vice-president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Jean-Pierre Bemba, has been transferred to The Hague in the Netherlands for trial on war crimes charges - including accusations of sexual crimes committed in the Central African Republic (CAR).
The International Criminal Court (ICC), which will conduct the trial, announced his transfer from Belgium - where he was arrested in May - in a statement on Thursday.
Its announcement followed a day after a setback for the prosecution in another landmark case before the court, in which DRC militia leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was ordered released.
The ICC said Bemba, head of the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC) was alleged to be responsible for five counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity committed in the CAR between October 2002 and March 2003.
The warrant on which he was arrested said that Bemba's militia, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), acted in concert with CAR forces to engage in rape, torture, degrading treatment of a person and looting.
The ICC said at the time of his arrest that a particular feature of his case was "the number of rapes carried out with shocking brutality." The prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, alleged: "He had done it before in CAR, he had done it before in the DRC. He had to be stopped."
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Massive Sexual Crimes Will Not Go Unpunished - ICC
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