Home invasion in London, Ont., a possible targeted killing of Liberian warlord
The victim of a home invasion murder in London, Ont., is reportedly a former general in a West African rebel militia who once was the subject of intense investigation by Canadian war crimes investigators.
Bill Horace, 44, was killed in the early morning around 4:40 am Sunday when four men, three of them in hooded sweatshirts and hospital-style facemasks, forced their way into a house.
The London Free Press reported a neighbour saw two go to the front door and two to the back, before hearing breaking glass, a struggle, and seeing Horace run out the front door where he was shot. Police said Horace’s family was in the home at the time.
CTV quoted a neighbour who heard one gun shot and saw the men leave in two cars.
Paramedics took the victim to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police in London said they do not believe this was a random incident, but said nothing about why Horace, who lived in Toronto, may have been specifically targeted.
“The London Police Service has received several media inquiries about the identity of the deceased and possible historical association to National Patriotic Front in Liberia. The London Police Service is aware of these inquiries, but cannot confirm this fact at this time,” a statement said.
Several media outlets, in Canada and Africa, identified Horace as the former leader of a rebel militia fighting the brutal war in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s.
Canadian journalist and historian Michael Petrou was among those who drew the link on Twitter. His reporting a decade ago in Maclean’s revealed Horace was a former general in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) living freely in Toronto despite being accused by witnesses and former associates of conducting and commanding “atrocities on a massive scale.”
“Everyone around here used to go to the big palm nut farm to cut palm and make oil to eat and sell,” according to a witness at Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation, quoted by Petrou. “Gen. Bill Horace and his men were passing. They entered the plantation and accused us of looting the place. He then ordered his men to arrest people. They started chasing us, and everybody was running all over the place. They then started firing at us. I first saw one woman fall. The bullet hit her on the head. Her husband was crying. Then one of the other fighters shot him also. Both of them died instantly.
Two years later, in 2012, it emerged Canada was formally investigating Horace for war crimes.
That same year, the former president of Liberia and leader of the NPFL, Charles Taylor, was convicted at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone for planning, aiding and abetting war crimes, some of the worst in recorded history. He is now serving a 50 year sentence in a British prison.
In his book American Warlord , based on the life of Taylor’s American son, Chucky, author Johnny Dwyer reports that by 1992 Horace was in fact the boyfriend of Taylor’s daughter, Zoe.
“Horace had a reputation for brutality that stood out even among Taylor’s rebels,” Dwyer writes. “He served as a commander of a contingent of Taylor fighters called the ‘Marine Division,’ overseeing a sprawling area of operations in Grand Bassa and Maryland County surrounding the port city of Buchanan. In a civil war characterized by atrocities, the Marine Division carried a singular reputation for depredations.”
As Dwyer reports, one of Taylor’s generals would, years later, point out to a truth commission: “If the Marine pass somewhere you will know … because of the flies … the whole NPFL was afraid of them, even the (sic) Charles Taylor was afraid of them. The Marine was the ones that brought the wickedness to the people.”
A Marine member told the commission that the unit had a licence from Taylor to “kill anybody and destroy anything” and were told not to take any prisoners.
Another fighter in the war told Dwyer that Horace was known for a particularly gruesome method of killing:
“He was in the habit of killing the crucifix way,” the man said. Horace, he said, would mount his victims onto wooden crosses.
“Many of us (Liberians) are here in Canada as a result of that war,” Leo Johnson, president of the Liberian Association of Canada, told the London Free Press. “We became refugees directly as a result of that war… It has become a reality in the Liberian community that our community is a mix of victims of war crimes and the perpetrators at the same time.”
Canada’s integrated War Crimes Program was launched in 1988 when Canada generally stopped trying to prosecute war crimes and focused instead on excluding and deporting war criminals. Canada has since adopted laws to help cooperate with international tribunals, such as the one that convicted Taylor.
This was the second homicide in 2020 in London, Ont.
— With files from London Free Press