JAIL FOR MILITANT TIMBUKTU VANDAL
Extremist pleaded guilty to directing 2012 attacks on Mali shrines in first verdict focusing on cultural ruin as war crime
Ex-radical given nine years for war crime after leading the destruction of ancient mausoleums,
THE HAGUE // War crimes judges yesterday sentenced a Malian extremist to nine years in jail for destroying the ancient shrines of Timbuktu, in a landmark ruling experts hoped would help to protect the world’s vulnerable monuments.
Judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague found Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi guilty of directing the 2012 attacks on the Unesco world heritage site in northern Mali.
Al Mahdi “supervised the destruction and gave instructions to the attackers”, said presiding judge Raul Pangalangan. “The chamber unanimously finds that Al Mahdi is guilty of the crime of attacking protected sites as a war crime.”
Dressed in a grey suit and bluestriped tie, Al Mahdi listened intently as the sentence was read out.
The verdict is the first to focus solely on cultural destruction as a war crime and the first arising from the conflict in Mali, when extremists swept into the country’s remote north in 2012.
Prosecutors had asked for a jail term of between nine and 11 years, which they said would recognise the severity of the crime and the fact that Al Mahdi was the first person to plead guilty before the court. Aged between 30 and 40, he last month pleaded guilty to the single war crimes charge of intentionally directing attacks in 2012 on nine of Timbuktu’s mausoleums and the centuries- old door of the city’s Sidi Yahia mosque.
“Legend had it that this door had not been opened for 500 years and that its opening would lead to the last judgment,” the presiding judge said.
But while the court recognised the severity of the crimes targeting sites that “were dedicated to religion and historic monuments and were not military objectives”, the judges also gave Al Mahdi credit for his guilty plea, and for his “substantial cooperation” with the prosecution.
The slight, bespectacled man with a mop of curly hair had previously asked the pardon of his people when videos were shown of him and other extremists knocking down ancient earthen shrines with pick-axes and bulldozers.
Founded between the fifth and 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu has been called “the city of 333 saints” and the “pearl of the desert” for the number of Muslim sages buried there.
Revered as a centre of Islamic learning during its golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was considered idolatrous by the extremists, who had swept across Mali’s remote north in 2012.
As the head of the so- called Hisbah – or Manners Brigade – it was Al Mahdi, a former teacher and Islamic scholar, who gave the orders to ransack the sites.
Apologising for his actions at the court, he said he had been overtaken by “evil spirits”, urging Muslims not to follow his example.
The court found that Al Mahdi was a member of the Ansar Dine, one of the groups linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which seized the northern territory before being mostly chased out by a French-led military intervention in January 2013.