The International Criminal Court opens war crimes hearings Tuesday against Joseph Kony, a brutal Ugandan rebel chief whose Lord's Resistance Army was responsible for murdering and kidnapping tens of thousands.

Kony was the first suspected war criminal indicted by the ICC in 2005 and the hearing itself is the first ever held in absentia at the court, after decades of fruitless efforts to find him.

He faces 39 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, enslavement and sexual slavery, allegedly committed between July 2002 and December 2005 in northern Uganda.

The former Catholic altar boy headed the feared LRA whose marauding insurgency against the Ugandan government saw more than 100,000 killed and 60,000 children abducted, according to the United N

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