Bucks County man pleads guilty to hiding past as bodyguard to former Liberian president and war criminal Charles Taylor

A onetime bodyguard for former Liberian president and convicted war criminal Charles Taylor admitted in court Monday that he hid his past working for that oppressive regime in hopes of securing U.S. citizenship.

Isiah Kangar, who had been living in the United States as a legal permanent resident since 2010, told a federal judge that he had assumed the identity of his younger brother when applying for a green card and later, on his citizenship application.

Kangar, 51, of Bristol, is at least the third Liberian national now living in the Philadelphia region convicted of immigration-related charges tied to roles they played during the West African nation’s brutal back-to-back civil wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. More than 200,000 civilians died during those conflicts amid numerous documented atrocities committed by combatants on all sides.

“It’s my decision. My decision alone,” Kangar told U.S. District Judge Mark A. Kearney, during a brief hearing at which he pleaded guilty to counts including conspiracy, visa fraud, and unlawful procurement of U.S. citizenship.

He now faces up to 10 years in prison on the most serious count at a sentencing scheduled for March. As part of the plea deal he struck with prosecutors, Kangar agreed Monday to be voluntarily deported to Liberia after he serves his prison term.

Until the first of the Philadelphia prosecutions, no one had been held criminally responsible for the numerous documented war crimes committed during the brutal Liberian conflicts.

Though Taylor was charged by an international court and convicted of war crimes in 2011, that case involved his actions during a different civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone. He is serving a 50-year prison term in England.

The first Liberian war figure convicted in Philadelphia was Mohammed “Jungle Jabbah” Jabateh, 57, of East Lansdowne, who was found guilty in 2017 and sentenced to three decades in prison for hiding his role in dozens of acts of murder, rape, enslavement, and cannibalism that he oversaw as a warlord during the fighting when he came to the United States.

A year later, a jury convicted Jucontee Thomas Woewiyu, of Collingdale — a former spokesperson and defense minister for Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia — of similar immigration-related crimes. He died in 2020 before he could be sentenced.

But unlike in those earlier prosecutions, government lawyers in Kangar’s case did not attempt to turn the case into an exhaustive reexamination of his wartime activities. Instead, they focused narrowly on Kangar’s decision to adopt his brother’s identity to gain permission to come to the United States.

Kangar first applied for a visa to come to America in 2009, after a bid for asylum he pursued in South Africa was rejected because of his ties to Taylor.

In that earlier application, which he filed under his own name, he acknowledged having worked for government security forces as part of Taylor’s regime and admitted to having committed killings on behalf of the government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Harrell wrote in court filings this summer.

She did not elaborate on the circumstances behind those killings or Kangar’s eventual departure from Taylor’s service.

Still, assuming that any attempt to gain legal status in the U.S. would raise red flags similar to those that prompted South Africa to deny his asylum request, Kangar adopted his brother’s identity on his U.S. visa application three years later, he told the judge Monday.

His deception proved successful. His green card was approved, and Kangar arrived in the United States in 2009.

It was only after he applied to become a citizen three years later that agents with Homeland Security Investigations discovered that Kangar was not who he was pretending to be.

In court Monday, Kangar acknowledged falsely using his brother’s name and admitted maintaining a Facebook profile under his false identity.

Before accepting the plea, Kearney, the judge, asked Kangar whether — unlike in his earlier interactions with the U.S. government — this time he had been entirely forthcoming.

“Everything,” Kangar said, describing the admissions he made moments earlier, “was the truth.”