On June 20, five years after beginning its work, the Special Court for Sierra Leone reached its first verdict. The three defendants were leading figures in the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the military junta that held power in Freetown between May 1997 and February 1998. After joining forces with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the AFRC began a brutal offensive on the Sierra Leone capital on January 6, 1999. It was ousted after three weeks of massacres and pillaging. In a decision that stretched to 631 pages, the judges found the three AFRC chiefs, Alex Tamba Brima, Brima Bazzy Kamara, and Santigie Borbor Kanu guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Their sentence will be handed down on July 16. The trial, begun on March 7, 2005, came to a close on December 8, 2006. The Court heard 148 witnesses and admitted 155 exhibits. The main suspect, Johnny Paul Koroma, the AFRC's head, who was indicted in 2003, is still at large, but possibly dead. The Chamber found that the AFRC and the RUF, and the three defendants in particular, had committed the crimes of extermination, murder, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement, pillaging, acts of terrorism, recruiting child soldiers, forced labor, mutilations, and collective punishment between 1997 and January 2000 in various parts of the country. A majority of the judges ruled that the crime of forced marriage did not constitute a separate crime but rather was a form of sexual slavery. The Chamber dismissed the charge of joint criminal enterprise, concluding that the AFRC's goal of seizing power and controlling national territory did not violate international law.