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The Fifth Floor

Factual: Life Stories

Global stories from the BBC’s 40 Language Services, with Faranak Amidi

Faranak Amidi presents global stories from the Fifth Floor, home to the BBC’s 40 Language Services.

Faranak Amidi presents global stories from the Fifth Floor, home to the BBC’s 40 Language Services

The Fifth Floor: 28/04/2012

28/04/2012

BBC World Service - The Fifth Floor, 28/04/2012

A Charles Taylor perspective from Nigeria, Rwanda and Kenya.

The view on Charles Taylor from Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya and remembering dinner with the former warlord; Coup plotters part two; Libya’s torture farms; and Hello! Magazine in Pakistan

A fresh look at the week's global news from across the World Service's 27 language sections, with David Amanor.

TAYLOR ON TRIAL
This week the former Liberian President Charles Taylor was found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes during Sierra Leone’s civil war, and he becomes the first former head of state to be indicted by a special court since the Nuremberg trials. What has the coverage been like across the African Services? Mansur Liman of BBC Hausa, Ally Mugenzi from the Great Lakes and Swahili service’s Ali Saleh give the regional context from Nigeria, Rwanda and Kenya. And BBC Africa’s deputy editor Josephine Hazeley, originally from Sierra Leone, is back home to report on the trial. We speak to her from Freetown about the time she once had dinner with the warlord.

COUP PLOTTERS: PART TWO
Captain Mbango and Sergeant Zumzoom have made their move. A coup has been plotted but there are still presidential palaces to loot, UN mediators to dodge and a few other strictly constitutional activities. To be continued…

LIBYA’S TORTURE FARMS
Feras Killani of BBC Arabic was reporting in Libya in March last year when he was detained by Gaddafi forces. He was taken to military barracks in Tripoli and held in blood stained cells, separated from his colleagues, beaten and subjected to a mock execution. He was released after 22 hours but five months after he was released, the same prison was the site of one of the largest single atrocities of the Libyan revolution when 50 prisoners were shut into a warehouse, grenades were thrown in, bullets were sprayed and the bodies were set on fire in an attempt to destroy the evidence. Feras recently returned to this prison and tells us about confronting his own demons whilst coming to terms with some of the horrific stories that leave the prospect of reconciliation in Libya a distant dream.

PAPPON'S PICKS
Our internet guru Thomas Pappon gives a rundown on the big-hitting stories across the World Service language sites this week - including attempts to Indianise cheerleading and Vietnamese croneyism

HANIF’S HELLO!
A rather well-known celebrity lifestyle magazine has just launched in Pakistan. With a satirical twinkle in his eye, writer Mohammed Hanif imagines if he was the launch editor of the first edition…


(Image: Charles Taylor in 1990, holding an AK-47. Credit: Getty Images)

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