The Paris criminal court, after an appeals trial that lasted three weeks, upheld a guilty verdict against Kamara for crimes against civilians between 1993 and 1994, including a teacher whose heart he reportedly chewed.

A French court on Wednesday sentenced former Liberian rebel commander Kunti Kamara to a 30-year prison sentence for violence against civilians and complicity in crimes against humanity during Liberia’s first civil war three decades ago.

Kamara, now 49, had been sentenced to life in prison during a first trial in Paris in 2022. The revised sentence on Wednesday follows an appeals trial that lasted for three weeks.

The Paris criminal court upheld a guilty verdict against the rebel commander for “acts of torture and inhuman barbarity” against civilians between 1993 and 1994, including a teacher whose heart he reportedly ate.

Kamara was also found guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity for not preventing soldiers under his command from repeatedly raping two teenage girls back in 1994.

The prosecution had on Monday urged the trial court to uphold his life imprisonment.

The allegations against Kamara date back to the early years of the back-to-back conflicts that would ultimately kill more than 250,000 people in the West African nation between 1989 and 2003.

The fighting was marked by rape, mass murders, and mutilations, in many cases by child soldiers conscripted by warlords, with atrocities against civilians common.

Kamara was a regional commander of a faction of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), a rebel group which fought the National Patriotic Front of former President Charles Taylor.

The case against Kamara was first brought by the Crimes Against Humanity Division of the Paris Criminal Court, after he was arrested in France in 2018.

The unit was set up in 2012 to try suspected perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide detained on French soil, regardless of where their alleged crimes were committed.

It was the first case taken by the unit that was not related to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Sabrina Delattre, lawyer for the NGO Civitas Maxima and eight Liberian civil parties, said Wednesday that it was “important for the victims and the civil parties who for the second time have been heard, and believed”.

She said they had been able to “obtain the justice they had not obtained in their country”.

So far, only a handful of people have been convicted in Liberia itself for their part in the brutal wars.