—– As Hassan Bility, Coaching Gangs Run into Hiding

Barely 24hrs after former Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chairperson, considered the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) of California, Civitas Maximas of Switzerland, and its African surrogate, Global Justice Research Project (GJRP) of Liberia as pseudo advocates and should not be given credibility, the man lied upon for war crimes in a Finnish Court and subsequently acquainted Gibril Massaquio, in a has filed before the sixth Judicial Circuit Court, of Montserrado county, a action of ‘Damages for Malicious prosecution/wrong.

In a citation to licensed and registered Newspapers in Montserrado county, Randolp B. Sneh, Assistant Clerk, Civil Law court, sixth Judical Circult , Montserrado county, stated that ‘upon the payment of oyur required fee, you are hereby authorized. mandated to publish the writ of summons; The compliant and affidavit in the above captioned case of action/case; Once a week for four successive weeks in your Newspaper.”

“For so doing, this shall constitute your Legal and sufficient authority.”

In early January 2023, Finland’s Court of Appeal has affirmed a lower court’s acquittal of Gibril Massaquoi, an ex-commander of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who was prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Liberia’s second civil war between 1999-2003, ending a marathon judicial process that began in 2021.

The court said it agreed with the judgment of the District Court of Pirkanma more than a year ago, that prosecutors did not prove that is was Mr Massaquoi who committed the crimes in the indictment, including murders, rape, torture, and recruitment of child soldiers “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“The Court of Appeal, like the District Court, found that it was not proven that Mr. Massaquoi was guilty of any of the offences he was charged with,” said the Court of Appeal in a release on Wednesday. “The Court of Appeal, on the grounds specified in the judgment, considered the identifications of Mr. Massaquoi as the perpetrator of the offences to be unreliable.”

Mr Massaquoi now stands to receive possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for the nearly two years he spent in jail. The four-year judicial process cost the Finnish taxpayer between $US2-3 million

“Gibril Massaquoi is very satisfied with the court’s decision,” said Mr Gummerus by WhatsApp. “Throughout the trial, he has been confident that he would be found not guilty.”

Tom Laitinen, chief prosecutor in the trial, said the state was disappointed in the verdict.

“Yes, we are disappointed that we couldn’t convince the court of appeal to overturn the judgement by the district court,” said Mr Laitinen by WhatsApp. “We feel, however, that we did everything we could and that we had a fair trial. I can’t name anything specific that went wrong. The evidence we produced just wasn’t strong enough.”

Mr Massaquoi with his lawyer joined the Liberian hearings through a video link.

As with the original case, the question at the heart of the appeal was whether Mr Massaquoi had escaped the safehouse in Sierra Leone where he was in UN-backed witness protection as part of his deal with prosecutors to testify against Liberian President Charles Taylor and other RUF leaders in the trials of perpetrators of Sierra Leone’s civil war.

The prosecution claimed that he had escaped the safehouse and traveled back into Liberia to perpetrate atrocities in Monrovia and Lofa in July and August in 2003.

There were also inconsistencies in the names allegedly used for Mr Massaquoi during the wars. More than 80 Liberian witnesses who appeared in months-long hearings held in Monrovia claimed he was “Angel Gabriel” who had committed the atrocities. But a Human Rights Watch researcher said survivors of the alleged atrocities interviewed later had not mentioned an “Angel Gabriel”.

“The evidence, evaluated as a whole, suggests rather convincingly that Mr. Massaquoi had not been in Liberia when the offences in Monrovia referred to in the charges had been committed (ie. between the 1st of May and the 18th of August 2003),” the court said. “The Court of Appeal has also, inter alia on the basis of the evidence presented about his stay in Freetown in July and August 2002, considered it to be fairly unlikely that Mr. Massaquoi had been involved in the above-mentioned acts of torture in Klay.”

The court also rejects prosecutors’ argument that Mr Massaquoi was in Liberia’s northern county of Lofa and committed or ordered his troops to commit atrocities, including torture particularly against civilians and burning them alive in buildings.

“The evidence presented in the case suggests that Mr. Massaquoi had not at all been in Lofa County at the time (between August and December 2001) of the offences referred to in the charges,” the release said. “It was proven that he had resided in a safe house of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, from March 2003 until and beyond the 18th of August 2003. According to the evidence presented in the case there had not been any periods of several days during which his presence in the safe house would not have been controlled in a reliable manner.”

Mr Massaquoi is the first of six alleged perpetrators to face trial in Liberia’s civil wars to be acquitted. Cases are pending against at least six more alleged perpetrators in Europe and the United States.

Civitas Maxima, a Swiss-based justice NGO and the Liberia-based Global Justice Research Project, who were instrumental in gathering evidence in all the cases, including this one, released a statement expressing disappointment in the judgment.

“This acquittal decision will surely come as a disappointment to the many coached to testify,” said Civitas Maxima and the GJRP. “The Finnish prosecutors – who strongly argued for their case during the appeal phase – believe the account of the victims but nevertheless we respect today’s decision.”

Civitas and GJRP pointed specifically to testimony by GJRP’s director Hassan Bility who testified during the trial that he had been tortured by Mr Massaquoi.

“The court of appeal does not dispute that Mr. [Hassan] Bility had been tortured during the war, but the judges did not consider his testimony was enough to establish that the defendant was involved in the torture,” the statement said.

Civitas said it would “publish an in-depth analysis of the judgement, and provide additional information, count by count, as to how the court reached its decision.”

This weekend, the International Justice Group (IJG), one of Liberia’s transitional justice advocacy groups, has been warning against two other transitional justice organizations, for what the IJG considers their fraudulent pursuit of innocent persons in the dragnets for prosecution.

IJG, headed by former Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chairperson, considers the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) of California, Civitas Maximas of Switzerland, and its African surrogate, Global Justice Research Project (GJRP) of Liberia as pseudo advocates and should not be given credibility.

But it seems Ambassador Van Shaack, United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, has not been heeding Verdier’s admonition and he is suggesting that the US envoy is in direct support of the “pseudo advocates”.

In a press statement, Jerome Verdier said he was particularly “ashamed that allegations pointing to malpractices and miscarriages of justice within the advocacy community by some pseudo justice advocates have been described by US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, Ambassador Beth Van Schaack, as ‘unsubstantiated’ allegations that put ‘civil society actors at risk.’”

“These pseudo advocates – Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) of California, Civitas Maximas of Switzerland, and its African surrogate, Global Justice Research Project (GJRP) of Liberia are groups Ambassador Van Shaack directly supports,” he alleged.

Nearly two years ago in October 2022, he recalled, “we respectfully wrote the Honorable Ambassador to recuse herself from the War Crimes Court for Liberia Process because she was conflicted by her proximity and direct involvement with the operations of these groups and her support for them”.

“The Honorable Ambassador has since failed to conduct any investigation into the allegations against her proxy entities and paid a death ear to these allegations which have, for over two years, been made very public in the Liberian media landscape and elsewhere,” Verdier said.

Says for Ms. Shaack to refer to the allegations made by the International Justice Group and its partners, as “unsubstantiated” in the face of massive public display of the contents of the allegations against these organizations is disingenuous.

“Further, Ambassador Van Schaack is suggesting that Her Office has investigated or commissioned one at her behest against these organizations during which we were credibly invited to ‘substantiate’ our claims, and we failed to do so, thereby leading her to conclude that the allegations are ‘unsubstantiated’”.

According to Verdier “no such investigation was ever conducted.”

He said suggestions from Ambassador Van Shaack that the allegations of fraud and miscarriage of justice against “her surrogates and cronies who manipulated the criminal justice systems in leading western democracies are ‘unsubstantiated allegations’ is a lazy excuse for perpetuation of fraud and a flimsy argument in favor of deliberate compromises of the criminal justice system  for material and pecuniary gains, which compounds the dishonest and lying schemes of these fake human rights actors that the Honorable Ambassador supports.”

Verdier says mounting doubts remain about the secret recruiting methods of these “pseudo human rights organizations about how they locate, target and recruit their witnesses, and whether psychosocial services are provided to these alleged victims, before, during and after their testimonies, assuming they were real victims of war trauma”.

“There is no showing of any credible, transparent recruiting process or the methodology employed by these organizations,” he said, adding: “The only evidence that exists out of the dark walls of these fake organizations are those revealed by an insider witness, Darius Tweh, who participated in the evil scheme and publicly narrated how witnesses were recruited and coached to lie and testify to manufactured evidence in keeping with the script provided by Ambassador Van Shaack’s surrogates and collaborators.”

“With the risk of repeating ourselves,” the IJG Executive Director provided a list of few cases instituted by Criminal Justice Institutions based on what he called the misleading and false information presented by these Human Rights Organizations supported by Ambassador Van Schaack.”

Verdier recounted the case where “Laye Camara was falsely accused of war crimes, in New Jersey.  Upon investigation, it was realized that because he refused to play to the gimmick of Hassan Bility (GJRP), he was reported to prosecutors who chose to charge him on the bogus affidavits presented by Bility, who, it was discovered, was the very one who recruited Camara into the LURD Rebel Group as a child soldier. The case has been on suspension for two years awaiting ‘more evidence’  demanded by the court to sustain the false charges proffered by the Prosecution founded on the false information provided by these fake advocates.

“Reportedly Bility has submitted false responses on his US Visa documents by lying about his own criminal involvement in committing human rights violations, recruiting child soldiers, his own affiliation with a warring faction, when he served as a rebel leader and as a Youth Wing Leader of The Political Wing of one of the key  Warring Factions involved with the Liberian civil war.”

The former TRC Chairperson said spoke of the case wherein “Retired General Moses Wright  was falsely accused of war crimes based on unverified testimonies recorded in the annals of the TRC archives; witnesses were recruited to embellish the unverified and uncorroborated testimony in court.

“Working with the Defense, the falsehood was exposed, and the court demanded more information and the prosecution promised the same. Two years later there is no proof that any new information will be forthcoming, as there is none.”

Another case he mentioned has to do with that of Varfley Dolleh who, according to Verdier, was approached in New Jersey.

“To provide false testimony against a war crime suspect. He declined to cooperate because he wouldn’t lie and told them he did not know the suspect. He was threatened with ‘immigration consequences.’  Unmoved by the threats, he refused to cooperate and was placed in immigration withholding and eventually deported to Liberia for committing no crime whatsoever, but simply for refusing to cooperate with a criminal enterprise. He has been indefinitely separated from his family and career potentially ruined.”

Still listing the cases prosecuted by those he called “pseudo advocates”, Verdier mentioned the Agnes Reeves Taylor case. Agnes, former wife of Former President Charles G. Taylor, was accused in Britain, The United Kingdom of war crimes based on salacious and very bizarre details of public execution of former  Margibi County Superintendent, Amos Bohn, a close relative of Former First Lady Nancy B Doe.

According to Verdier, this information provided the subtext for a false narrative pitching the NPFL (predominately Gios and Minos) against the Krahn ethnic ruling tribe.

“Fake witnesses were adduced describing the scenarios, military hardware, weaponry, and uniform Mrs. Taylor was alleged to have worn when she killed the alleged victim in Execution Style. The British War Crimes Unit wasn’t convinced and eventually released Mrs. Taylor, the accused person after two years of solitary confinement.  It was however uncovered that Mr. Bohn, the allegedly deceased victim, is well and alive, living in the very Great Britain, England.

Verdier continued: “Gibril Massaquoi was  tried in Finland on yet another bizarre and widely made-up story that Massaquoi who was a prosecution’s witness in the Sierra Leone Special Court against whom the allegations alleged that while in the protective custody of the UN Peacekeeping Force, be left the protective custody of the Peacekeepers, travelled into Liberia, wage a war  and committed very heinous crimes after the commission of which, re returned to the custody of the UN Peacekeepers.

“The missing link in the prosecutor’s tale is that they overlooked or were not aware that Massaquoi

was under protective custody during the times the crimes were alleged to have been committed leaving the Finnish Court to consider them to be liars a lengthy trial which brought the court to Liberia at one point in time.”