International Criminal Court seeks new charges against Congo’s ‘Terminator’

GlobalPost

The International Criminal Court sought new war crimes charges against Bosco "The Terminator" Ntaganda and other Democratic Republic of Congo militia leaders on Monday, according to Agence France-Presse.

Chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo labeled Ntaganda and Sylvestre Mudacumura two of the "most dangerous" men in the region in which millions have been killed in the past two decades, according to AFP.

Ntaganda is the leader of the rebel National Congress for the Defense of the People, according to Voice of America.

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Ntaganda has been wanted by the ICC since 2006, but Moreno-Ocampo said the new charges would include crimes against humanity such as murder, ethnic persecution, rape and sexual slavery, according to AFP.

The BBC reported that heavy fighting broke out in eastern DRC when the deadline for army mutineers to surrender expired on May 11. Ugandan officials told the BBC that thousands of Congolese villagers fled across the border into Uganda.

More on GlobalPost: Congo's 'Terminator': ransoming a country's peace

The fighters who defected last month and were believed to be loyal to Ntaganda were given five days to turn themselves in, but failed to do so. Ntaganda is accused of recruiting child soldiers to the same rebel group as Thomas Lubanga, who was convicted in March of war crimes. Ntaganda, however, has denied engineering the mutiny of former rebels who had been re-integrated into the army as part of a 2009 peace deal.

The number of Congolese refugees in Rwanda numbers 7,000, said the BBC, and an estimated 900 mutineers were still on the loose.

The DRC information minister, Lambert Mende, told VoA that the mutineers' complaints of low pay and difficult conditions were rubbish and said "foreign interests" played a role in fueling the conflict.

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