ICC Prosecutors say Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, Leader of Sudan’s infamous Janjaweed militia, personally committed murders in Darfur.
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known by the nom du Guerre Ali Kushayb, was in court for a hearing to decide if there is enough evidence for a full trial on 31 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Prosecutors told the court in The Hague that Abd-Al-Rahman, an ally of deposed Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, was an energetic perpetrator of murders in the Darfur war in 2003-04.
The 70-year-old suspect, who becomes the first to face charges at the International Criminal Court over the conflict and who handed himself in last year after more than a decade on the run, denies the charges.
ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told the court in The Hague that Abd-Al-Rahman was feared and revered in equal measure as the colonel of colonels and was a senior leader of the infamous Janjaweed militia
The United Nations says 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million people were displaced in the Darfur conflict.
Fighting broke out in 2003 when ethnic African rebels, complaining of systematic discrimination, took up arms against Bashir’s government.
Khartoum responded by unleashing a notorious Arab-dominated militia known as the Janjaweed, recruited from among the region’s nomadic tribes. Abd-Al-Rahman fled to the Central African Republic in February 2020 when the new Sudanese government announced its intention to cooperate with the ICC’s investigation
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