Lord's Resistance Army rebel convicted of war crimes in Uganda

In a landmark case in Uganda, a former child soldier turned rebel commander of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Thomas Kwoyelo was found guilty on 44 counts, including murder, kidnapping and looting.

He denied all 78 charges against him.

Of the remaining 34 charges, Kwoyelo was acquitted of three counts of murder and 31 other charges were dropped.

Kwoyelo is the first LRA commander to be tried in a Ugandan court – a turning point for the country's justice system.

The trial took place in the city of Gulu in northern Uganda – the region terrorized by the LRA for more than two decades.

Wearing a dark suit and red tie, the former LRA commander showed no emotion in the face of the long list of convictions.

A judge read out the names of the civilians killed on Kwoyelo's orders.

One notorious incident was an attack on a camp for displaced civilians in Pagak, northern Uganda, in 2004. Dozens of women and children were beaten to death with wooden clubs.

Kwoyelo has spent the last 14 years in detention, which analysts attribute in part to the scale and complexity of the case.

Joseph Kony founded the LRA in Uganda more than two decades ago and claimed he was fighting to establish a government based on the Bible's Ten Commandments.

The group was notorious for chopping off people's limbs and kidnapping children to use as soldiers and sex slaves. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from their homes by the conflict.

The LRA was initially active in northern Uganda and then expanded its activities into the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where Kwoyelo was arrested in 2009. They later also spread to the Central African Republic (CAR).

The group was largely wiped out, but Mr Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, was never caught.

The human rights organization Human Rights Watch had previously criticized the delays in the Kwoyelo case, saying that overall accountability for the crimes committed during the 25-year conflict, including abuses by Ugandan state forces, was limited.

In 2021 Senior LRA commander Dominic Ongwen was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the International Criminal Courtwhich decided not to sentence him to life imprisonment because he had been kidnapped as a child and abused by rebels who had killed his parents.

Kwoyelo says he too was kidnapped by LRA fighters on his way to school at the age of 12.

Thousands of former LRA members have been granted amnesty under a controversial Ugandan law after leaving and dissociating themselves from the rebel group.

But Kwoyelo was not given this opportunity; the verdict on his case is still pending.