The bones and skulls of hundreds of people killed 15 years ago near the small Liberian village of Kpolokpai were transported in wheelbarrows to a marked mass grave where they were buried during a formal ceremony yesterday.

The church service honouring the dead is intended to try to put to rest this particular chapter in Liberia's 14-year civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people. Mourners, including church leaders and farmers, stood with their hands folded as the remains were lowered into a 10-foot-wide (three-metre-wide) pit.

Massacre

Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that the 1994 Kpolokpai massacre was led by fighters of the Liberian Peace Council, a rebel group fighting Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia. The cocoa-growing village of Kpolokpai is located around 25 miles (40 kilometres) north of Gbarnga, the town that served as the headquarters of Taylor's rebels.

The massacre in September 1994 began when Liberian Peace Council fighters rounded up the residents of Kpolokpai. They used machetes to hack to death around 30 alleged National Patriotic Front of Liberia rebels before opening fire on the crowd, killing the rest.

Grace Yeaney, a member of a group of women that initiated the burial, said the people of Kpolokpai grew tired of government promises of a proper burial.

"Lots of people have been coming and seeing the bones and promising that they would carry out a ceremony like this, but that was not happening," she said. "So we have come to give a befitting burial to these people who are Liberians and our own people."

Culture of impunity

Some mourners, like Michael Biddle, who came from Gbarnga to attend the ceremony, said they felt justice still needed to be served.

"To see skulls upon skulls, bones upon bones just exposed in this manner after 15 years," he said. "The culture of impunity should stop. People should be made to pay the price for these kinds of things."

The Liberian civil war began in 1989 when the National Patriotic Front of Liberia launched its first offensive and ended in 2003 when Taylor, who had been elected president, was forced into exile. He is now on trial in the Hague for multiple crimes against humanity.

The country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report this summer, recommending prosecution for former heads of warring factions.