How Taylor ordered us to kill, eat Nigerian UN soldiers - Taylor’s death squad commander

14.03.2008

Former Liberian President, Charles Taylor, ordered his fighters to eat the flesh of captured enemies including Nigerian and UN soldiers, a former close aide testified on Thursday at Taylor's war crimes trial.

“He (Taylor) said we should eat them. Even the U.N. white people he said we could use them as pork to eat,” Joseph ‘ZigZag’ Marzah, who described himself as Taylor's former death squad commander, told the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague.

When asked how he prepared humans to eat, Marzah said: “We slit your throat, butcher you... throw away the head, take the flesh and put it in a pot ... Charles Taylor knows that.”

Taylor, once one of Africa’s most feared warlords, faces charges of rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers during a 1991-2002 conflict. He has pleaded not guilty.

Marzah, on his second day as witness in his former leader's trial, gave graphic details of atrocities in Liberia and Sierra Leone and of an ingrained culture of violence and brutality.

On Wednesday, he described how he had killed so many men, women and children he had lost count, and he had also slit open the stomachs of pregnant women on Taylor’s order.

More than 250,000 people died in wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Prosecutors say Taylor wanted to plunder neighbouring Sierra Leone’s diamonds and destabilise its government by controlling and arming rebels.