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Rwandan man jailed in Germany on genocide charges

February 19, 2014 Musah Gwaunza International

FRANKFURT — A German court yesterday sentenced a former Rwandan town mayor to 14 years in jail for aiding genocide in a church massacre of hundreds of people 20 years ago.
The defendant, Onesphore Rwabukombe (56) the former mayor of the town of Muvumba in north-eastern Rwanda, showed no visible reaction when he was found guilty.

At least 400 Tutsi victims were killed in an “extremely brutal manner” with machetes, axes and hoes in the 1994 attack, said presiding judge Thomas Sagebiel.

The court found Rwabukombe had ordered the attack on the church grounds in the nearby town of Kiziguro and later organised taking away the bodies and dumping them in pits.

It was the first case heard in Germany related to the Rwanda genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed between April and July 1994.

Rwabukombe had since 2002 lived in Germany, where he had applied for political asylum. He was arrested in 2011 on an Interpol arrest warrant.

Rights group Amnesty International hailed the verdict as an “important signal”.

“In every genocide the perpetrators must expect to be brought to justice,” said its legal expert Patrick Kroker.

The three-year trial had heard nearly 120 witnesses, and Germany had sent criminal investigators to Rwanda.

Prosecutors had asked for a term of life in jail over the killings.

“Germany is not a safe haven for accomplices to genocide,” the head of Germany’s prosecution service, Christian Ritscher, told AFP.

“We are very pleased that the German court was in a position to carry out this difficult procedure. This was a pilot trial.”

The defence had demanded an acquittal in the trial at the higher regional court in the western city of Frankfurt.

Defence lawyer Natalie von Wistinghausen said she was planning to appeal.

Germany has prosecuted war criminals from the Nazi era and the former Yugoslavia for genocide but this was the first time it has tried someone over the Rwandan blood-letting.

The Frankfurt court heard the case because Germany did not want to extradite the defendant to Rwanda, fearing he would not receive a fair trial, and as international courts in The Hague and Tanzania did not ask to handle the case. — AFP.

 

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