[5] Until March 2013, he was wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the war crimes of enlisting and conscripting children under the age of fifteen and using them to participate actively in hostilities.
[11] Ntaganda was born in the small town of Kinigi, situated in the foothills of Rwanda's Virunga mountain range in the Musanze District.
[2] When he was a teenager, Ntaganda fled to Ngungu-Masisi in eastern DRC after attacks on his fellow ethnic Tutsis started taking place in Rwanda.
[citation needed] He attended secondary school there but did not graduate; at the age of 17 he joined Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels in southern Uganda.
[5] On 1 November 2005, a United Nations Security Council committee imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on him for violating an arms embargo.
[14] In 2006, following conflicts within the UPC, he returned to North Kivu, his home province, and joined Laurent Nkunda's National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).
[19] According to DRC authorities, General Bosco Ntaganda had "crossed from Goma to the town of Gisenyi, Rwanda, twice in 2011, in March and again in September, despite the travel ban imposed on him.
[21] On 4 April 2012, it was reported that Ntaganda and 300 loyal troops defected from the DRC and clashed with government forces in the Rutshuru region north of Goma.
"[24] On 22 August 2006, a Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Ntaganda bore individual criminal responsibility for war crimes committed by the FPLC between July 2002 and December 2003, and issued a warrant for his arrest.
[16] On 18 March 2013, Ntaganda handed himself in to the U.S. embassy in Kigali, Rwanda,[25] where he requested transfer to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
He pleaded not guilty to eighteen charges brought against him, including rape, murder, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual slavery of civilians.