Senegal police have arrested the former Chadian President Hissene Habre, who is wanted for alleged atrocities such as political torture and killing during his eight-year rule. Habre has been living in exile in Senegal for the past 22 years.
Habre’s lawyer said he was taken from his home in Dakar by paramilitary police to an unknown location on Sunday 30 June.
As president of Chad from 1982 until his ousting in 1990, Habre is said to have committed widespread human rights abuses and atrocities, accusations which he denies. Human Rights Watch claims that 1,200 were killed and 12,000 were tortured, while a domestic Chadian inquiry claims that as many as 40,000 were killed and that over 200,000 were subjected to torture.
The 70-year-old has been under house arrest since 2005. Human rights group have been urging Senegal to put Habre on trial for decades, and last year the UN’s International Court of Justice ordered Senegal to either put him on trial or extradite him to face justice overseas.
His arrest comes just days after Barack Obama praised the efforts of Senegal’s current President Macky Sall to bring him to trial at the start of his Africa tour.
Habre was first indicted in Senegal in 2000, but the country’s courts ruled at the time that he could not be tried there.
However, Senegalese MPs passed a law in last year allowing a special African Union tribunal to be created in the country to try the former president, dubbed by some as “Africa’s Pinochet”.
If the trial goes ahead it will set an important precedent: until now African leaders accused of human rights abuses have only been tried in international courts.
