NEWS 60-Year-Old Paralysed Amputee Blames Charles Taylor Posted by Joseph Cheeseman on Nov 1, 2008, 10:29

A 60-year-old wheelchair-bound amputee man has blamed his condition on the former Liberian president Charles Taylor. The 79^th prosecution witness Mohamed Mansaray was testifying at the trial of Mr Taylor at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague.He said Charles Taylor had announced on the BBC that Sierra Leone would taste the bitterness of war and that his amputation and subsequent paralysis were testament to tasting that bitterness.

Giving a chilling account of his experience, he told the court that his uncle, Gibril Turay, a farmer, was dispossessed of his produce and later beheaded by the rebels in a Sierra Leonean village called Moala in Pujuhun District. In what he said happened to his face, Mansaray said the head kept jumping and blabbing for about five minutes before losing life.

Defence lawyer Morris Anyah quickly rose to his feet saying the disclosure of the uncle’s name was a violation of the principle of disclosure. He said the Prosecution document given to the Defence did not bear the name of Mr. Mansaray’s dead uncle so the evidence about the decapitation should be omitted. But the prosecution told the judges that they had made full disclosure to the defence.

Having listened to legal arguments from both sides, Justice Julia Sebutinde delivered her ruling on the matter. “Mr Anyah, we do acknowledge that the accused has a right to have full disclosure of this name that you've just named, in addition to the incident of decapitation. We acknowledge that this is the right of the accused in order to help him prepare or enable him to adequately prepare” she said, adding that this was a right under the statute. She said it would be “drastic to simply strike out this evidence given the fact that the incident itself was disclosed to you... in this case we will not strike out the evidence altogether.”

From his wheel chair, Mr. Mansaray clenched the fist of his amputated hands as he testified to how he and five other men were systemically amputated by a rebel commander identified as Staff Alhaji in 1998 in Tombodu, Kono district. He said they chopped off his hands by placing them on a mortar starting with the left. He said there were armed rebels surrounding them in case anyone attempted to escape until all five had their hands chopped off with a machete.