South Sudan's Former Vice President Riek Machar has admitted that he never formed a committee to investigate the massacres perpetrated at the Bentiu mosque and hospital in April 2014 in spite of earlier claims to have done so.

Riek Machar is the head of the rebel group SPLM-IO, which briefly overran Bentiu city in April 2014 allegedly committing massacres in several parts of the city. The worst massacre took place at the Kalibalek mosque, targeting hundreds of foreign traders.

The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said in a human rights report that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that hundreds of civilians were targeted and killed by SPLA/IO forces... in Bentiu. At least 19 civilians were killed at the Bentiu Civil Hospital, and approximately 287 civilians were killed at the mosque.”

In an interview with Radio Tamazuj on Wednesday, Machar admitted that SPLM-IO never set up any committee to investigate the alleged killings nor produced any written report about them.

“Honestly, before we could form a committee, the investigation [of the United Nations] came out on this subject, and we already know who committed these crimes,” he said. “We know something happened, and there is an international organization that investigated that, and we know the group that perpetrated this crime. So if there is any court we will be ready to help.”

Asked why the SPLM-IO did not form its own investigation committee he responded, “We did not form a committee because after we got a report that came from a well-known international organization we just managed to identify the individuals involved.”

However, he denied that the perpetrators were from their own forces claiming instead they were just “armed civilians.” He did not say whether SPLA-IO detained any of the suspected killers or took any other action against them, nor did he reveal their names.

Machar also questioned the reported death toll saying, “The number of the victims is disputable.”

Contradictions

Riek Machar's statements today contradict earlier claims by the rebels that they were conducting their own internal investigation into the massacre.

“We have formed an investigation committee, so the committee is now working on the matter,” said SPLM-IO head of external relations Dhieu Mathok in an interview with Radio Tamazuj in February.

Likewise, in an interview with 'The Africa Report' in August 2014, Machar himself claimed that his movement was investigating the Bentiu massacre.

“We are also investigating the incidents which happened,” he said. He even reported that he received preliminary findings from the investigation, saying that 'a squad of ten people' committed the massacre including one man armed with a machine gun.

He said he had instructed Peter Gadet, who was then the top rebel commander in the area, to locate the ten suspects. In the same interview he was asked whether the report of the investigation committee would be made public. He responded, “Surely, yes. We will provide it to the African Union Commission of Inquiry.”

Similarly, in March 2015 he told a journalist from Kenya's Nation Media Group that “we investigated [the incident] through our own machinery.” He said that the investigations uncovered that the many of the people killed in the Bentiu mosque were not civilians but soldiers who died in a battle.

“There was a battle in the mosque and a good number of people died,” he claimed.

Nighttime burial

Machar has not explained why SPLA-IO forces made hurried efforts to bury the bodies from the mosque at a remote area far from the city, on the first night after the killings.

Rather than burying them at a convenient burial site in or near Bentiu, the SPLA-IO diverted critical military resources from the frontline including soldiers, vehicles and fuel in order to ensure that they were buried far from the city.

Several survivors of the massacre were forced to work as a burial crew. They later revealed to UN human rights workers that they loaded over 250 bodies from the mosque onto a dump truck on the night of 15 April.

The dump druck left the mosque after midnight escorted by two military pick-up trucks. At least 37 bodies were left behind either because there was not enough room in the dump truck or because the burial crews were in a great hurry to complete their work before dawn.

The dump truck carried the bodies over 30 kilometres from Bentiu. A burial crew of nine survivors sat in the dump truck on top of the bodies as they traveled.

The convoy passed Khaljak village and then turned left onto a narrow track before stopping beside a drainage ditch. UNMISS' report says that the survivors unloaded the bodies into the ditch. There were so many bodies that it took several hours to complete the task.

At dawn, after unloading the bodies, the convoy returned to Bentiu, according to the UNMISS human rights report. The nine survivors were released and ordered to go to the UNMISS camp in Bentiu.

Victims found in civilian clothes with hands tied

While the majority of bodies from the Kalibalek mosque were buried immediately in a mass grave, many other people killed elsewhere in Bentiu town were left unburied for days.

Between 20 and 24 April 2014, UN Human Rights officers working in Bentiu documented the presence of 81 dead bodies, 79 in civilian clothes and two in military fatigues. The bodies were found in 21 separate locations, spread widely throughout the Kalibalek area of Bentiu.

“In at least four of the locations where bodies in civilian clothing were found, the bodies had their hands tied behind their back or had evident bullet holes to the head,” says UNMISS human rights report published in January.

No battle inside mosque

Reports produced by the UNMISS Human Rights Division say there is no evidence that any battle took place inside the Kalibalek mosque. In a report published on 8 May 2014 the UN Mission stated, “Opposition forces attacked and killed several hundred civilians at the mosque on 15 April.”

The UN report explained that many “foreign traders” had been sleeping in the mosque for months prior to the massacre, as it was considered safer than the market place. The traders sought to leave Bentiu before the rebel attack on Bentiu but government troops turned them back as they fled the city.

As a result, the traders were obliged to return to the Kalibalik area of Bentiu. When SPLA-IO troops overran the government forces, the traders were still at the mosque.

Rebel fighters soon arrived at the mosque and found a crowd of the foreign traders inside.

“The exact sequence of events and what triggered the shooting remains unclear. It appears that one fighter in a military uniform with a machine gun, came through a door and opened fire... one victim [i.e., a survivor] reported that he managed to reload his machine gun during the shooting... Several fighters were seen shooting through the windows,” the UN reported.

The UN report also says that the shooters paused during the massacre to do a racial cull, after realizing some Ethiopian and Eritrean traders were among the crowd in the mosque. After escorting them out of the mosque to safety, the shooters continued to kill more Sudanese.

However, not everyone inside the mosque was killed and many of the wounded were later transported to the hospital on orders of SPLA-IO officers who arrived at the scene after the massacre, according to the UN reports. These survivors would later provide eyewitness accounts of what happened.

File photo: Riek Machar in his office in Juba in 2012 (Voice of America)

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SPLA-IO rebels begin investigation into April 2014 Bentiu massacre (25 Feb.)

S Sudan rebel general admits to killing of unarmed Darfurians (16 Jan.)

Document: UN releases details of April Bentiu massacre (11 Jan.)