"Scenes and Tales from a Hospital after the Rebel Invasion of Freetown and Other Stories of Terror"
from http://www.sierra-leone.info/civilwar/amputeetales.htm
(copied to this web site because the original is difficult to read)

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Other stories of the civil war, with pictures

But they ignored him. They held his arms flat on a tree stump. And he felt the machete fall on a wrist, then on the other.

"This," the rebels told him, "is an example to show the president."

Mrs. Koromoh said the rebels had also sliced off the hands of her 8-year-old daughter and had kidnapped the 13-year-old. "They killed my sister and my husband," she said.

Mohammed Sesay, no relative of the other Sesay, is a farmer who did not know his own age, stood with his 2-year son, Osman, whose fractured head was bandaged like a bicycle helmet. A couple of weeks earlier, rebels had invaded the family's house outside Freetown.

"They caught his mama chopped, chopped her," said. Sesay "Then they threw him the inside toilet."

A few feet away, Lamine Jusugarka, 46, the father of six, sat slumped on the concrete ground, both hands gone. His niece, Isata Bangura, 15, whose parents had been killed two days earlier, fed him potato chips. His wife sat nearby, crying, her kneecaps smashed by a hammer-wielding rebel. The day before, according to Jusugarka, a former security guard at Barclays Bank, rebels had invaded his neighborhood east of Freetown. Most were young men, or even boys, led by a rebel who called himself Junior. "He's a young man I can handle and deal with" under normal circumstances, Jusugarka said. But the rebels, pointing guns, forced him and his neighbors under a mango tree.

"Because there was a root on where you could put your hands firmly," he recalled. "Then he took a big axe and cut your hand instantly. Tell you to put another one. You put it. Cut it. We were 50 in number. "

Oh, I felt so bad," he said. "I felt as if I am finishing the world (finished in the world) . My eyes were dark. My blood was pumping as if they had opened a tank, a water tank to run. Oh, I fell down. I could not see my way. "

"We were in the line. One after another. You go next. When they finished with you, when they cut your two hands, you run. They say, 'Move! If you don't move, we'll fire on you.' Fifty on that particular day."

Moctar Diallo, a confident, straight-talking schoolboy, knew he was not going to escape mutilation by the rebels. He had only one plea; that they chop off his left hand because he was right-handed.

But they refused his request. And just to make absolutely sure that no surgeon would ever sew his limb back on, the rebels put the severed right hand on a tree stump and chopped that in two as well.

One Monday rebels attacked the northern town of Gbendembu, leaving over 100 dead. Inside the Wesleyan Church in Gbendembu town, people have found 11 men, women, and children with their throats savagely cut. Relief workers tell stories of gang rapes, people burned alive and fathers mutilated because they refused to rape their daughters

A survivor related to Reuters how he had watched the attack as he hid on the roof of a building next to the Wesleyan Church.

"They searched from house to house...Then I saw them march 11 people, men, women and children from (the) nearby bush into the church. The wife of the church pastor, Marie Fornah, was among the 11, and also the pastor's uncle," he said. "The rebels closed the door after they entered. After two or three minutes I heard their hostages screaming. It was horrible. They were screaming that the rebels were killing them, cutting their throats."

The survivor said the rebels, numbering about 20, left the church after about 30 minutes. "I waited another half hour and stole into the church. There were the bodies of the 11, all of them with their throats cut and blood still gushing out," he said. "I don't know if my parents were captured by the rebels." he said. He added that he saw the rebels driving scores of
people, mainly women and children, into the bush.

Korban (20), a mechanic, is sitting in the outpatients' wing of the Makeni hospital dripping blood into a bowl on the floor while doctors sew up the stumps of his fingers. On the right side of his head fresh lint covers the wound where his ear used to be. On the left there is little more than a lobe and a deep red gash. The eyes of this girl were burnt out, after she had been raped.

The rebels had come for Kulo Korban on Saturday night. They left him with a letter and took away three of his fingers and both ears. "I was asleep when I heard a knock on the door. Then four men kicked it down and dragged me away. They tied me to a pole and said, 'Today is your last day.' Then they just started chopping with machetes and cutlasses all around my head and arms. "When they had finished they told me, 'Go to (Sierra Leonean President Ahmed Tejan) Kabbah and see if he will give you a new hand.' They put the letter in my other hand." The note was addressed to the Nigerian-led West African military force Ecomog and demanded its immediate withdrawal from the area.