For war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in the city of Timbuktu over ten years ago, a prominent member of an armed Malian group was given a ten-year prison sentence by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz, who was the police chief after the Ansar al-Din organization, which is affiliated with al-Qaeda, took over Timbuktu in 2012 for over a year, was found guilty in June of accusations that included torture, rape, and sexual slavery, as well as the destruction of religious and historic structures.
On Wednesday, presiding judge Kimberly Prost declared that the 47-year-old was involved in the Ansar al-Dine rule, whose acts caused “traumatic harm to the people of Timbuktu.”
It was said that the populace “lived in an atmosphere of fear, violence, oppression, [and] humiliation.”
