A former Lord’s Resistance Army rebel commander was sentenced Friday by a Ugandan court to 40 years in prison for brutal murders committed by the group during its insurgency that began in the 1980s.

The prison sentence of Thomas Kwoyelo – a child soldier turned rebel commander – is for the most serious crimes he has faced, including multiple counts of murder, rape, robbery and slavery.

In August, Kwoyelo was convicted on 44 of the 78 charges he faced for crimes committed during the insurgency between 1992 and 2005.

The sentence was handed down by a High Court panel sitting in Gulu, the northern city where the LRA once operated.

He can appeal the sentence.

Kwoyelo, whose trial began in 2019, had been in detention since 2009 while Ugandan authorities tried to figure out how to deliver justice in a fair and credible way. Human Rights Watch described his trial as “a rare opportunity for justice for the victims of the two-decade war between” Ugandan troops and the LRA.

Prosecutors said Kwoyelo held the military rank of colonel in the LRA and ordered violent attacks on civilians, many of them displaced by the rebellion.

The LRA’s overall leader, Joseph Kony, is believed to be hiding in a vast area of ​​ungoverned bushland in central Africa. The US offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Kony’s capture, who is also wanted by the International Criminal Court.

One of Kony’s lieutenants, Dominic Ongwen, was sentenced in 2021 by the ICC to 25 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Thousands of other rebel fighters have been granted amnesty by the Ugandan government over the years, but Kwoyelo, who was captured in neighboring Congo, was denied such a reprieve. Ugandan officials have never explained why.

Kwoyelo, who has denied the charges against him, testified that only Kony could be held accountable for the LRA’s crimes and said all LRA members face death for disobeying the warlord.

The LRA, which began in Uganda as an anti-government rebellion – and later expanded its operations into neighboring Congo as well as the Central African Republic – has been accused of recruiting boys to fight and keeping girls as sex slaves. At the height of its power, the group was a notoriously brutal outfit whose members eluded Ugandan forces in northern Uganda for years.

The LRA has been accused of carrying out several massacres mostly targeting members of the Acholi ethnic group. Kony, himself an Acholi, is a self-proclaimed messiah who said at the start of his rebellion that he wanted to rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments.

When military pressure forced the LRA out of Uganda in 2005, rebels scattered across parts of central Africa. The group has disappeared in recent years, and reports of LRA attacks are rare.