Yard makes Liberia war crimes arrest

SCOTLAND YARD’S war crimes unit has arrested a man in Britain in connection with atrocities committed during Liberia’s civil war two decades ago.

The 45-year-old, who has not been named, was detained in a dawn raid on a house in south-east London yesterday, police said.

He is being questioned in connection with offences committed during the west African nation’s 14-year conflict, in which up to a quarter of a million people died. Charles Taylor, the former Liberian warlord who served as the country’s president, is doing a 50year sentence in a British prison after being found guilty at the Hague war crimes tribunal in 2012 of crimes against humanity.

His ex-wife, Agnes Reeves-taylor, who moved to Britain and worked as a lecturer at Coventry University, was arrested and charged with torture in 2017. But her Old Bailey trial, which was scheduled to last four months, collapsed last December after her lawyers won a bid to have the case discontinued. The 54-year-old had been charged with eight war crimes offences, including conspiring to use rape to torture women and forcing a child to watch people being shot. She denied wrongdoing.

Her defence team argued that the case should never have been brought because Ms Reeves-taylor was not a serving state official at the time.

The failure of the case raised question marks over the cost to the British public purse. The bill for the investigation by the war crimes unit into Ms Reeves-taylor’s case is believed to have run into millions of pounds.