A former chief of Islamic police who personally oversaw amputations and floggings in northern Mali by al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in 2012 and 2013 has been sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It took judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague just 26 minutes to hand down the sentence to al-Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud (47), who played a leading role in what prosecutors described as a “reign of terror” in the ancient Sufi city of Timbuktu.
The region at the time had been overrun by the jihadist group Ansar al-Din, which seized Timbuktu in collaboration with the main Tuareg rebel group in Mali and staged punishments in the central square in front of local crowds, including children.
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Those punishments included floggings and public amputation of limbs, usually hands, by machete, which judges heard in the course of the trial were part of a “systematic policy” by Ansar al-Din and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to control the population.
“The entire population of Timbuktu was targeted,” said presiding judge Kimberly Prost. “Every aspect of life was affected. The regime and its acts of violence had a traumatic effect which remains in the minds of its victims today.”
Female members of the population were disproportionately affected”, she added. “They lived in constant fear of the regime no matter what they did or how they sought to comply. Some no longer venture outdoors.”
Hassan was handed over to the ICC by the Malian authorities in 2018, five years after French troops liberated Timbuktu from the jihadists.
His trial began in 2020 and he was found guilty by the court last June on a total of eight counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity and acquitted on six counts, including charges of rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage.
The court found that although widespread crimes of sexual violence had taken place while his group was in power, he was not found personally culpable due to insufficient evidence.
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The International Federation for Human Rights said at the time that the verdict had been “tainted” by disappointment at the fact that the ICC judges did not convict Hassan of any gender-based crimes – or recognise gender-based persecution as a crime against humanity.
The judges also found he played no role in the destruction of Timbuktu’s centuries-old earthen tombs and shines to Muslim sages that were systematically destroyed by Ansar al-Din using pickaxes and bulldozers because they considered them idolatrous.
Judge Prost asked Hassan – wearing a white headdress – to stand while she read the sentence.
She concluded by noting that reparations for the victims in the case could now be addressed “in due course”.
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