Warlord Ntaganda of the Congo will serve his prison term in Belgium

The International Criminal Court said on Wednesday that Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda, who was found guilty of war crimes and given a 30-year prison sentence, has been sent to Belgium.

In 2019, the ICC found “Terminator” Ntaganda guilty of running a terror campaign in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 2000s.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), which is in The Hague, said that Bosco Ntaganda was sent to the Kingdom of Belgium to finish his time in prison at the Leuze-en-Hainaut facility.

The previous colonial power in the Congo was Belgium.

According to Peter Lewis, the registrar of the court, “The ICC relies on the help of nations for the enforcement of its sentences and is greatly appreciative of the voluntary cooperation of the Belgian government in this instance.”

Ntaganda, who was born in Rwanda, was found guilty of 13 charges of war crimes, including murder, rape, and the use of child soldiers, in addition to five counts of crimes against humanity.

The first person to be found guilty of sexual slavery by a court was Ntaganda. Many of the new claims were about killings in villages in the mineral-rich area of the Congo called Ituri.

The prosecution painted him as the brutal instigator of ethnic Tutsi uprisings during the civil wars that tore through the Congo in the wake of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in the neighboring nation of Rwanda.

Ntaganda, who once served as a general in the Congolese army, joined the M23 rebel group as one of its original members. In 2013, Congolese government forces ultimately overcame the M23 rebel group.

Later that year, when he entered the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, he became the first suspect to ever turn himself in to the ICC.

Ntaganda argued that the term “Terminator,” which alludes to the movies in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a merciless killer robot, did not apply to him. He is noted for his pencil mustache and love of good cuisine.

On appeal, Ntaganda’s sentence was upheld the previous year.