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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi was an enthusiastic member of a radical Islamic occupying force that systematically destroyed most of Timbuktu's World Heritage-listed mausoleums in 2012, prosecutors alleged Tuesday at an International Criminal Court hearing.
Al Mahdi is the first suspect to face an ICC charge of deliberately attacking religious or historical monuments, in a case the court's chief prosecutor likened to the destruction last year by Islamic State extremists of historic ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra.
The case involves "the destruction of irreplaceable historical monuments" and a "callous assault on the dignity and identity of entire populations and their religion and historical roots," Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told judges at a hearing to establish whether to put Al Mahdi on trial.
Bensouda said Al Mahdi, also known as Abou Tourab, helped organize the destruction of nine mausoleums and a mosque's door in 2012. All but one of the buildings was on the UNESCO World Heritage list, she said.
Al Mahdi, dressed in a white robe, spoke only once, to say he understood the case against him. He wasn't required to enter a plea. His defense team suggested he would seek to justify his actions on religious grounds if the case goes to trial.
Prosecutors allege Al Mahdi was a member of Ansar Dine, an Islamic extremist group with links to al-Qaida that ruled across northern Mali in 2012. The militants were driven out after nearly a year by the French, who arrested Al Mahdi in 2014 in Niger.
Al Mahdi was a Timbuktu-based expert on Islamic law recruited to enforce Ansar Dine's strict interpretation of Islam on the occupied Timbuktu, prosecutors say. Judges were shown a video clip of him, assault rifle slung over his shoulder, reading out an Islamic court's sentence.
"(He was) concerned with doing what is right, seeking the means to allow his conception of good over evil to prevail," his lawyer, Jean-Louis Gilissen, said.
The radicals destroyed 14 of Timbuktu's 16 mausoleums, one-room structures that house the tombs of the city's great thinkers, calling them totems of idolatry. The mausoleums have since been restored.
Gilissen said the aim was not to destroy the tombs but their "coverings."
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