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From Standard Times Press News Paper IN THE COURTROOM When former president Charles Taylor returned to court after observing a Jewish holiday he was met in court by a 73-year-old man who had his right arm amputated below the elbow and the bones in his left hand broken. Not knowing Osman Jalloh was an amputee, the judge asked him to hold the Koran as the oath was being administered.
Jalloh said he came into contact with a group of men in January 1999 at Calaba Town in the outskirts of Freetown singing, “We want peace” and threatening that anyone who failed to join them would be flogged. He gave testimony of how eight people were amputated at Calaba Town because of what he quoted the rebels as saying was a revenge for the bombing of their positions by the West African intervention force, ECOMOG.
Recounting how his friend Otick was killed, Jalloh said he was asked to place his hand on a pounding block. When he pleaded with the rebel, he was ordered for a second time to place his hands for amputation warning him not to plead with him. But he pleaded again. “So the man chopped him on his head with a cutlass then blood started oozing from his head, and all over his body was blood… Otick [started] rolling on the ground…and after three days Otick died.”
The 73-year-ols man told the court that after Otick it was his turn. He narrated to the court how the rebels amputated him and gave him a message to ECOMOG and the Sierra Leonean government. “He struck me once, and he told me to put the right hand again, and he chopped it, and it [was dangling]. He chopped the left hand again with both dangling as gave me a message” for the pro-government forces.
Asked what the message was, Jalloh said it was a message for the then-president Tejan Kabba and ECOMOG not to ever come to rebel territory. The witness wept in court while a court assistant removed the sleeves of his gown from what remained of his amputated hands. His right hand was cut below the elbow and the left hand broken but not severed from the body.
Under direct examination Jalloh told prosecution lawyer Catherine Howard that the first rebels he saw had come from Liberia because Charles Taylor had threatened in a radio interview that Sierra Leone would taste the bitterness of war.
He ended his testimony weeping for his condition. He lamented that he can no longer eat or relieve himself without being aided by someone else.
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