Seventy child soldiers released

Former rebels have released 70 child soldiers in Lunsar, some 70 km east of Freetown, Major Toby Lyle, military spokesman of the UN Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL) told IRIN on Thursday. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC - Sierra Leone’s former military junta) released the children on Saturday last and handed them over to military observers of UNOMSIL and the ECOWAS Peace Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). “We expect more child soldiers to be released in Port Loko (northeast of Freetown) this Saturday,” Lyle said. Thirty percent of the estimated 15,000 former RUF combatants are children, most of them originally abducted, according to a humanitarian source. The source estimates that 12,000 to 20,000 people were being held captive by the rebels when the RUF and government signed a peace accord in Lome in July, but fewer than 500 had been formally released as at 1 October. Although large numbers of captives are believed to have been released informally and to have returned to their home areas, it is clear that many remain in captivity, the source said. The Committee on the Release of Prisoners of War and Non-combatants, chaired by UNOMSIL, has set up two reception centres for released abductees, one in Waterloo on the outskirts of Freetown and the other in the eastern town of Kenema.