Sierra Leone Guerrilla Chief Is Captured

Rebel leader Foday Sankoh, Sierra Leone’s most wanted man, was captured Wednesday and turned over to government soldiers in the West African nation.

Sankoh, whose Revolutionary United Front rebels shattered a ragged 10-month peace accord earlier this month and took hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers hostage, had been missing since a May 8 clash between militiamen and his bodyguards at his villa.

His capture raised hopes of a cessation in hostilities that have threatened to plunge Sierra Leone back into civil war. Still in question is whether a July peace agreement that temporarily halted the fighting--and allowed the RUF to be part of the government--will be reinstated or international sponsors of the deal will judge it beyond repair and help craft a new accord.

Government soldiers told reporters that Sankoh was grabbed after he was spotted by a resident near his home in a seaside area of Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. Some reports indicated that Sankoh was wounded in the leg during a brief gun battle between militiamen and his bodyguards. The rebel leader was stripped naked by the militiamen and driven away, witnesses said.

British officials said the 64-year-old former corporal was flown by British military helicopter from a police barracks in the city to a “safe location” nearby, where he was being held by the Sierra Leonean government “under the auspices of the United Nations.”

“It’s now a matter for the Sierra Leone government and the U.N. to decide what should happen [to him],” Alastair Campbell, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, told reporters in London.

Meanwhile, the Reuters news agency reported that Sierra Leone’s rebels freed 80 more U.N. soldiers. U.N. spokesman David Wimhurst said in Freetown that the hostages had arrived in the Liberian border town of Foya, where 139 U.N. soldiers were released Sunday.

Sankoh’s rebels still hold about 270 peacekeepers. Officials in neighboring Liberia--where President Charles Taylor, an ally of Sankoh, has been negotiating the release of the captives--warned that the rebel leader’s detention might hinder the release and safety of the remaining captive peacekeepers.

In Washington, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Sankoh’s arrest was “good news.”

But other U.S. officials were restrained in their assessments.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher refused to say if Washington thinks Sankoh should be prosecuted for war crimes, noting that the fate of the rebel leader “is in the hands of the people of Sierra Leone.”

A senior U.S. official said later that the Clinton administration’s top priority is the release of the detained U.N. troops and that inflammatory rhetoric directed at Sankoh might make that more difficult.

Boucher said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, President Clinton’s special envoy, was scheduled to leave Wednesday night for meetings in Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Mali and Sierra Leone. But Boucher said Jackson would not meet with Sankoh.

In Freetown, hundreds of people poured out into the streets, cheering and rejoicing as news spread of Sankoh’s capture. Many Sierra Leoneans, ravaged by eight years of civil war, said they hoped that the peace deal could be revived--but without the involvement of Sankoh, who few believe is really committed to ensuring the nation’s stability.

The RUF leader “only knows how to kill,” said Mohammed Bah, a 19-year-old mechanic whose left leg was amputated by Sankoh’s marauding rebels.

Under the agreement, Sankoh and his followers--who killed, maimed and mutilated thousands of civilians in a bid to gain power--were granted full amnesty. The rebels also received key government positions. Sankoh was appointed vice president and put in charge of a commission on national reconstruction, development and strategic resources, which included control of the country’s lucrative diamond mines.

While many in the steamy seaside capital view Sankoh as nothing more than a thug, many of his followers are passionately loyal and call him Pappy or Pa.

“He’s a real dynamic leader; he cares for the people. His ideology is an ideology that will promote the development of the country,” Idrisa Kamara, a rebel colonel, told The Times before Sankoh’s return to Freetown last fall to assume the vice presidency. Kamara also has since been detained.

Sankoh’s core supporters are primarily uneducated, rural men who know only combat. They can readily identify with Sankoh, whose education ended in elementary school. He joined the army in 1956 as a radio operator. He was critical of the officers who staged the country’s first coup in 1967 and later handed power to elected leader Siaka Stevens.

Convicted of plotting a coup against Stevens, Sankoh spent six years in jail in the 1970s. He became a commercial photographer upon his release and organized a cell of student activists in the southern town of Bo. These youngsters were the foundation for his RUF rebel group.

In the 1980s he studied in Libya and sought logistical help and weapons from the government of Moammar Kadafi and later Liberia’s Taylor.

The Sierra Leonean rebel boss spent the early 1990s in the bush, training his guerrillas and indoctrinating them with doses of religious education, Maoism and African nationalism. He became notorious for his obsession with ruling his fiefdoms in the north and east of the country like a monarch.

According to Sierra Leonean college lecturer Deen Jalloh, who formerly served as a Sankoh aide and RUF secretary-general, the rebel leader’s eccentricity soon degenerated into dementia and evil.

“Sankoh is consistently inconsistent and reliably unreliable,” Jalloh told the British Sunday Telegraph newspaper recently. “He is paranoid and doesn’t trust or believe anyone. Most of all, he is a megalomaniac and mega-egoist.”

Since disappearing earlier this month after the shootout at his home, Sankoh’s fate had been the subject of heated debate in this war-weary city. Among the rumors that circulated: He had died of a heart attack; fled into the bush; received asylum in Liberia; or was being secretly detained by the U.N. force, known as UNAMSIL, as a bargaining chip for the release of the peacekeepers.

Sankoh’s rebels have continued to fight, even during his absence. They clashed for the first time Wednesday with British paratroops, who reported killing at least three rebels in a 10-minute battle just after midnight, about 10 miles outside the British-held international airport in Freetown. Fighting also raged between the RUF and Sierra Leone’s army and allied militiamen about 40 miles northeast of the airport.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.