A top Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commander has been taken into custody by US military forces.

The US State Department indicated that a man who identified himself as Dominic Ongwen had surrendered to US military personnel in the Central African Republic.

In 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Ongwen and four other senior LRA commanders with war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in northern Uganda.

The senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch Ida Sawyer says that the apprehension of the LRA Commander Dominic Ongwen would be a major opportunity to advance justice for the LRA’s long record of atrocities.

Led by the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, the LRA has killed and abducted thousands of civilians, many of them children, in remote regions of northern Uganda, northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.