The destruction of mausoleums in Timbuktu, Mali’s legendary sanctuary city, is the result of the negligence of French colonizers, said on Monday May 9 the lawyer of a jihadist tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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Under the jihadist yoke, a wave of destruction fell in 2012 and 2013 on the city, founded between the 5th and 12th centuries by the Tuareg tribes and nicknamed “the city of 333 saintsfor the number of Muslim sages buried there. “The events of 2012 are the result of the corruption and negligence of the French colonizers“, declared before the judges of the ICC Melinda Taylor, lawyer of Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, known as Al Hassan.
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Al Hassan, 44, a Malian national and father of five children, is on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the ICC, which sits in The Hague. He is accused of torture, rape and sexual slavery committed in the context of forced marriages, and the destruction of mausoleums in Timbuktu, nicknamed “the pearl of the desert“. “The State of Mali was a fiction created by the French colonizers that existed on paper but never in realitycontinued Melinda Taylor. The French haveleft the north of the country to fend for itselfand this in accordance with tribal and religious practices, she added.
‘Not an extremist’
Al Hassan, whose trial began in 2020, was a key figure in the Islamic police and justice system established by jihadists in northern Mali in 2012, according to the prosecution. “The question is not whether these crimes were committed in Timbuktu but whether this person sitting in front of you should bear the responsibility for these crimes.said Al Hassan’s lawyer. “Al Hassan should not be sentenced because he happens to have lived in the wrong place at the wrong time and because of his ethnicity“raised Melinda Taylor.
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It was “religious but he was not an extremisthe went to concerts in Timbuktu andflirted with girls“, she clarified. Al Hassan is the second Malian jihadist tried by the ICC for the destruction of the shrines of Timbuktu, a site listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. In 2016, the Court sentenced Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi to nine years in prison.
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