Judges at the International Criminal Court on Thursday found former Central African Republic football federation chief Patrice‑Edouard Ngaïssona guilty of 28 war crimes and crimes against humanity for coordinating anti-Balaka attacks on Muslims in 2013‑14. He was sentenced to 12 years. Co-defendant Alfred “Rambo” Yekatom was convicted on 20 counts and handed 15 years.
The verdict caps a nearly four-year trial featuring more than 170 witnesses and almost 20,000 exhibits. Both men denied all charges. Ngaïssona was acquitted of rape; Yekatom was cleared of recruiting child soldiers.
Prosecutors said Ngaïssona financed and directed anti-Balaka militias as their self-declared political coordinator, while Yekatom led fighters into Bangui on 5 December 2013, where civilians were slaughtered. The campaign, prosecutors argued, cast Muslims as “enemies of the nation,” leading to murder, torture and persecution.
CAR spiralled after the mostly Muslim Séléka rebels seized power in 2013, prompting mostly Christian anti-Balaka militias to mobilise. Tit-for-tat violence killed at least 1,000 people in Bangui that December and displaced half the city’s population.
Ngaïssona—barred from a 2015 presidential run—headed CAR’s football federation, briefly served as sports minister, and was elected to the CAF executive committee in 2018 before his arrest by France later that year. Yekatom, elected an MP in 2016 despite UN sanctions, was detained in 2018 after firing a gun inside parliament; his transfer marked CAR’s first extradition to the ICC.
Rights groups hailed the verdicts as a signal that Bangui is willing to confront impunity.