Hello and welcome to New Zah from the BBC World Service coming to you live from our

studios in Central London I'm Julian Marshall.

And we begin today with the sentencing of a former commander in a notorious Ugandan rebel group,

the first to be convicted by a Ugandan court.

The Lord's Resistance Army under its leader Joseph Koney, an indicted war criminal, abducted,

mutilated, raped, and killed tens of thousands of civilians in a reign of terror that ended in 2006 but not before.

It had spread from Uganda to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

It's still deemed a terror group by the UN and Western government.

Senior members of the group at Narkonia being captured and one was convicted by the International Criminal Court in the

Hague three years ago.

Former LRA commander Thomas Coyello was found guilty in August of charges including rape, mutilation, murder and forcibly

recruiting child soldiers.

Today a judge in Uganda handed down a 40-year prison sentence.

Well, both boys and girls,

rebut by the rubble group, the girls to work as sex slaves.

Victoria Nianjura was one of those children, taken from a college in

Aboke in northern Uganda along with 29 of her schoolmates in 1996. By the time she managed to escape after eight years in captivity, she had two children.

This is part of her story.

I was 14 at the time of abduction, just like many other school girls we were with at St Mary's College.

I just had about the Lord's Resistance Army, but I didn't know that at some point it would befall me.

So we were dark hair that night, tied, others are tied on the ways, others tied their arms backwards,

to make it hard for us to run away. Then walking through that

...