A UN-backed court jailed Liberia’s Charles Taylor for 50 years yesterday for fuelling Sierra Leone’s savage war, known for its mutilations, drugged child soldiers and sex slaves.

The former Liberian president, 64, was convicted last month of all 11 counts he faced of war crimes and crimes against humanity for aiding and abetting Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front during the country’s 1991-2001 civil war.

In return, he was paid in “blood diamonds” mined by slave labour in areas under control of the rebels, who murdered, raped and kept sex slaves, hacked off limbs and forced children aged under 15 to fight, the court found.

“The accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting some of the most heinous crimes in human history,” said Special Court for Sierra Leone judge Richard Lussick, reading out the ruling yesterday.

He detailed a litany of horrors, including rebels cutting open pregnant women “to settle bets on the sex of a child.” Many witnesses were “weeping as they testified. Their suffering will be life-long,” Judge Lussick said.

“The trial chamber noticed that the effects of these crimes on the families and society as a whole in Sierra Leone was devastating,” the judge said at the hearing in Leidschendam, just outside The Hague.

It was the first sentence against a former head of state in an international court since the Nuremberg Nazi trials in 1946.