June 24, 1999
Web posted at: 7:59 p.m. EDT (2359 GMT)

From Correspondent Catherine Bond

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (CNN) -- Rebels who occupied the capital of Sierra Leone in January engaged in a deliberate, large-scale campaign of human rights abuses, including murders, rapes and mutilations, according to a report issued by the group Human Rights Watch.

The report calls the violence in Freetown in January "the most concentrated period of human rights abuses in eight years of civil war."

"The rebels dragged entire families out of their homes and murdered them, hacked off the hands of children and adults, burned people alive in their homes, rounded up hundreds of young women and sexually abused them," the report said.

The rebels were eventually expelled from Freetown by a Nigerian-led intervention force. But Human Rights Watch found that those troops also engaged in human rights abuses, executing at least 180 people without trial.

And in a letter to U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, the group complained that "the appalling atrocities in Sierra Leone have been largely ignored," in stark contrast to the international response to human rights abuses in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

During the terror in Freetown, the rebels made little distinction between military and civilian targets, the report said. Massacres took place at both a Christian church and a Muslim mosque, and rebels killed at least 63 Nigerian traders, 85 unarmed police officers and several journalists. However, the violence apparently did not break down along tribal lines.

Among testimonies given by rape victims, one woman described how she was raped by the man who had just killed her husband. Another said she saw a 12-year-old girl bleed to death from rape injuries.

According to the report, many attacks appeared to have been planned. Victims said rebels filled sacks with severed hands, which were amputated with an ax.

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