Foday Sankoh

Biography

Sankoh, belonging to the Temne tribe, was born into a poor farming family in Northern Sierra Leone. In 1956 he joined the Royal West African Forces and trained as a cameraman and a wireless operator reaching the rank of corporal. In 1971, he was arrested and imprisoned for seven years for joining a coup plot against Siaka Stevens.

He was also reportedly a student leader, later traveling to Libya in the 1980s to train under the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. In 1991 Sankoh returned to Sierra Leone and sponsored by Liberian rebel Charles Taylor he launched a civil war against the government of Sierra Leone. In 1997 he was arrested in Nigeria on weapons charges, but had been released by July 1999 to sign the Lomé peace agreement.

This agreement, however, faced multiple violations and called into question his control of his army and his commitment to ending the civil war. After an angry mob marched on his Freetown villa in May 2000 and threatened to lynch him, he was taken into protective custody and held in detention until his death in July 2003.