A man known as ‘Dragon Master’ during a Liberian civil war admitted lying about his past on immigration documents

A Liberian immigrant who spent years living in the Philadelphia region pleaded guilty Thursday to fraudulently obtaining immigration documents by failing to disclose that he had previously served as a high-ranking rebel general known as “Dragon Master” during a Liberian civil war.

Prosecutors had been preparing to take Laye Sekou Camara to trial and present evidence that he had misled immigration authorities and failed to admit that he had been “personally responsible for numerous extrajudicial civilian deaths,” either by killing people himself or overseeing the slaughter of civilians, in the early 2000s, court documents said.

One of the alleged victims was a 20-year-old woman who had given birth to a baby boy just a week earlier, the documents said. In another instance, according to prosecutors, Camara — who also went by the nom de guerre K-1 — fatally shot a man he believed had stolen headphones, then ordered a crowd of onlookers to leave his remains on display for three days as a public warning.

But by pleading guilty Thursday to charges including possession of a fraudulently obtained immigration document, Camara was spared from facing witnesses from Liberia who would accuse him of such atrocities on a witness stand.

The charges against him did not center on specific allegations of violence. Instead, Camara admitted that he had lied when answering questions on forms including applications for a green card and employment at a New Jersey-based home health agency. Among other things, court documents said, Camara denied having ever recruited child soldiers when he knew he had done so during the war.

Camara faces up to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to four immigration-related counts. He is scheduled to be sentenced in May.

Camara’s attorney, Ellis Palividas, said Camara, 46, who now lives in Atlantic County, N.J., denied the allegations that he had committed war crimes but acknowledged that he had lied to immigration authorities about whether he had ever been a member of a rebel group in the war-torn country.

Palividas said Camara’s exposure to the violent conflict began when he was a child. When Camara was 12, Palividas said, he and his family tried to flee Liberia and reach neighboring Sierra Leone, but his father was stopped at a checkpoint, then tortured and beheaded in front of Camara and relatives, including his 2-year-old sister. His stepmother was also raped while the family was held in custody, Palividas said.

After that, Palividas said, Camara was recruited as a child soldier and was, “in many ways, also a victim of this conflict,” during which scores of civilians were killed as the country experienced waves of instability and chaos. Palividas said that even Camara’s nicknames were not as sinister as they appeared — K-1 was a reference to Camara’s last name, he said, while Dragon Master was a radio call name he chose because he liked the song “Unleash the Dragon” by the American R&B singer Sisqo.

“He was exposed to [a number of] traumatic events” from a young age, Palividas said.

Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia have used immigration cases to pursue alleged Liberian war criminals several times in recent years — convicting at least three other Liberian nationals living in the region of deceiving immigration authorities by omitting mention of atrocities during the conflicts that roiled the country decades ago.

In past cases, defendants have been accused of committing or overseeing acts of murder, rape, and enslavement. The first person to be convicted — Mohammed “Jungle Jabbah” Jabateh of East Lansdowne — was sentenced in 2018 to three decades in prison.

Jucontee Thomas Woewiyu of Collingdale — a former top official for Liberian warlord Charles Taylor — was convicted later that year of similar immigration crimes. He died in 2020 before he could be sentenced.

And last fall, Isiah Kangar, a former bodyguard for Taylor, admitted using his younger brother’s name to gain entry to the United States and then apply for citizenship. Kangar — who, unlike the others, was not accused by federal prosecutors of wartime misconduct — is scheduled to be sentenced in March.

Until the first of those prosecutions, there had been little criminal accountability regarding actions in Liberia in the 1990s and 2000s, when two civil wars left an estimated 200,000 civilians dead.

Taylor was convicted of war crimes in an international criminal court in 2011, but the charges stemmed from his conduct during a civil war in Sierra Leone. His son, meanwhile, was convicted in Miami in 2009 for torturing political enemies in Liberia during his father’s presidency. He was sentenced to 97 years behind bars.