Captain Moussa Dadis Camara is in Guinea tp present himself in court over his alleged responsibility in the massacre of protesters in Conakry on September 28, 2009.
Captain Dadis Camara, head of the military junta from December 2008 to January 2010 in Guinea, has been living in exile in Burkina Faso for several years.
He returned over the weekend to his country for his trial, which is due to open on Wednesday September 28, 13 years to the day after the killings in a stadium in Conakry, the Guinean capital.
He is due to appear alongside ten other defendants, including Colonel Abdoulaye Chérif Diaby, Minister of Health at the time, to answer to charges of abuses thought to have been committed during an opposition rally in a Conakry stadium that was brutally repressed.
The demonstrators had gathered to peacefully demonstrate and dissuade Mr. Camara from running for president in January 2010.
156 people were executed, thousands injured and hundreds of women raped, according to the report of a UN-mandated international commission of enquiry, published three months after the killings.
“My client arrived in Conakry on Saturday night to respond to his summons to appear in the 28 September trial,” Pépé Antoine Lamah, one of Moussa Dadis Camara’s lawyers, told AFP, adding that he is “in a safe place for security reasons” and is receiving some friends.
Seizing power in a military coup in 2008, Captain Camara is accused by his former aide-de-camp and head of the presidential guard, Aboubacar Sidiki Diakité alias Toumba of masterminding the 28 September 2009 massacre.
Diakite who is also implicated in the case, had opened fire on Dadis Camara two months later, causing his hospitalization in Morocco before being forced to leave for exile in Burkina Faso.
ODL/cgd/lb/as/APA