HAGUE-(MaraviPost)-The International Criminal Court (ICC) has sentenced 45-year-old Dominic Ongwen, a former commander of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to 25 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Uganda.

The Presiding ICC Judge Bertram Schmitt passed the verdict on Thursday, May 6, 2021 after Ongwen was found guilty in February of 61 charges including murders, rapes and sexual enslavement.

Before assuming the position of commander, Dominic Ongwen was reportedly abducted at the estimated age of nine by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as he was walking to school in northern Uganda between 1987 and 1988.

He later became the brigadier in the army around his late 20s after winning the confidence of LRA leader Joseph Kony.

The court in February heard that Ongwen personally ordered his soldiers to carry out mass killings of more than 130 civilians at refugee camps between 2002 and 2005.

In early 2015, he surrendered to US special forces who were hunting Kony in Central African Republic (CAR). He is the first person convicted by the ICC of the crime of forced pregnancy, for abducting and raping so-called “wives”, some of whom were underage, Al Jazeera reported.

His defence lawyers have always cast him as a victim of the LRA’s brutality who was traumatised after being abducted as a nine-year-old boy and turned into a child soldier in the group’s violent insurgency.

Before the verdict, Ongwen told the court that the LRA forced him to eat beans soaked with the blood of the first people he was made to kill as part of a brutal initiation following his own abduction aged nine.

The Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year prison term for Ongwen and not the maximum 30 years to life allowed by the ICC due to his history as a justification for the lower sentence.

However, the victims of his crimes had asked the court to impose a full life sentence on the former child soldier, while the defence had sought a 10-year prison term.

The LRA was founded 30 years ago by former Catholic altar boy and self-styled prophet Kony, who launched a bloody rebellion in northern Uganda against President Yoweri Museveni which left more than 100,000 people dead and 60,000 children abducted.

The group’s founder, Joseph Kony, is believed to still be at large and is the subject of an arrest warrant from the Hague-based court.