Sierra Leone war-time leader Ahmad Tejan Kabbah dies

Mr Kabbah was first elected president in 1996, ending a decade of military rule. He was briefly ousted in a military coup the following year before being restored to power by a West African regional force.

He won a landslide victory in the 2002 elections and was praised for maintaining peace and establishing democratic institutions, although he was also criticised for failing to tackle poverty.

“If we are now enjoying peace and stability in Sierra Leone, there is no way President Kabbah could be dissociated from that,” government spokesman Abdulai Bayraytay said on Thursday.

Born in 1932, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah began his career in public service in 1959, rising to become the youngest permanent secretary in the country in the late 1960s.

He then spent 21 years working for the UN Development Programme, based in New York, Lesotho and Tanzania.

In 2012 the UN-backed Sierra Leone war crimes court in The Hague convicted former Liberian leader Charles Taylor of aiding and abetting war crimes in the Sierra Leone civil war.

He was the first former head of state convicted by an international court since the Nuremburg military tribunal of Nazis after World War II.