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Islamic radical in court over Timbuktu mausoleum destruction | Islamic radical in court over Timbuktu mausoleum destruction |
(about 3 hours later) | |
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi was an enthusiastic member of a radical Islamic occupying force that systematically destroyed most of Timbuktu’s World Heritage-listed mausoleums in 2012, prosecutors alleged Tuesday at an International Criminal Court hearing. | |
Al Mahdi is the first suspect to face an ICC charge of deliberately attacking religious or historical monuments, in a case the court’s chief prosecutor likened to the destruction last year by Islamic State extremists of historic ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra. | |
The case involves “the destruction of irreplaceable historical monuments” and a “callous assault on the dignity and identity of entire populations and their religion and historical roots,” Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told judges at a hearing to establish whether evidence is strong enough to put Al Mahdi on trial. | |
Bensouda said Al Mahdi, also known as Abou Tourab, helped organize the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque’s door in 2012. All but one of the buildings was on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites, she said. | |
Al Mahdi, dressed in a white robe, stood briefly to say he understood the case against him. He wasn’t required to enter a plea. | |
Prosecutors allege he was a member of Ansar Dine, an Islamic extremist group with links to al-Qaida that ruled across northern Mali in 2012. The militants were driven out after nearly a year by a French military intervention. French forces arrested Al Mahdi in October 2014 in Niger and transferred him to ICC custody nearly a year later. | |
Al Mahdi was a Timbuktu-based expert on Islamic law who was recruited by Ansar Dine to lead a group that enforced the radicals’ strict interpretation of Islam on the occupied town’s inhabitants, prosecutors say. Judges were shown a video clip of him, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, reading an Islamic court’s sentence to the public. | |
The radicals destroyed 14 of Timbuktu’s 16 mausoleums, one-room structures that house the tombs of the city’s great thinkers, calling them totems of idolatry. The mausoleums have since been restored. | |
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |