Former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor is being held in
one of Britain’s highest-security prisons, his family say, alongside
notorious murderers, terrorists, psychopaths and paedophiles.
HMP Frankland, near the northeastern English city
of Durham, houses 800 of the most dangerous offenders in the prison
system and is the jail where double child-murderer Ian Huntley had his
throat slashed by inmates three years ago.
“He is being incarcerated in Frankland prison,”
Taylor’s wife Victoria Addison Taylor told AFP, the first indication of
the former president’s whereabouts.
“They took him to this prison where high (risk)
criminals, terrorists and other common British criminals are kept and he
is being classified as a high risk prisoner... He is going through
humiliation and you cannot treat a former head of state that way,” she
added.
The 65-year-old former president in September lost
his appeal over a catalogue of gruesome acts committed by the Sierra
Leonean rebels he aided and abetted during that country’s 1991-2001
civil war, one of the most brutal in modern history.
He was transferred to an unnamed prison in Britain last month.
Frankland is the largest of five high security
prisons in England and Wales, where inmates have included the two men
jailed for the high-profile murder of British police officer Sharon
Beshenivsky.
War crimes
The prison previously held Harold Shipman, one of
the most prolific serial killers in recorded history, blamed for up to
250 murders, who hanged himself in HMP Wakefield in January 2004.
Huntley, 39, jailed for life for the 2002 murders
of 10-year-old school friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, was
rushed to hospital in 2010 after being found lying in a pool of blood at
Frankland, his throat slashed with a makeshift knife.
In 2011, two prisoners disembowelled 23-year old Mitchell Harrison, who had been convicted for raping a 13-year old girl.
Triple killer Kevan Thakrar stabbed three prison
guards several months earlier while British Al-Qaeda activist Eesa
Bharot needed a skin graft after he was attacked with hot oil and
boiling water by fellow inmates in 2007.
Taylor is likely to spend the rest of his life
behind bars after the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in
The Hague upheld his 50-year sentence in September.
His landmark sentence on 11 counts of war crimes
and crimes against humanity was the first handed down by an
international court against a former head of state since the Nazi trials
at Nuremberg in 1946.
The British government had offered in 2007 to
house Taylor in a British jail if he was convicted, and to cover the
costs of his imprisonment.
SOURCE: AFRICA REVIEW
SOURCE: AFRICA REVIEW
