OWN CORRESPONDENT, Dar es Salaam | Monday 2.00pm.
A TANZANIAN court on Monday adjourned for two days an application by Kigali for the extradition of the suspected murderer of a Rwandan prime minister and 10 Belgian peacekeepers.
Magistrate Projestus Rugazia postponed the case to Wednesday to give former Rwanda major Bernard Ntuyahaga time to obtain a lawyer who speaks both English and French.
The foreign ministry has provided the accused with two interpreters.
Ntuyahaga is wanted in his home country to answer charges of killing prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana in April 1994, along with the Belgian UN troops in a contingent guarding her.
The court rejected Ntuyahaga’s plea that he be allowed to make international telephone calls from his prison cell, but ruled that the suspect could send and receive mail and be visited by relatives.
Uwilingiyimana and the Belgian soldiers assigned to her were killed at the very start of Rwanda’s 1994 civil war, when Hutu extremists slaughtered up to 800,000 men, women and children before being overwhelmed by an army of rebels from the Tutsi minority.
Belgium had also applied for Ntuyahaga’s extradition, but Belgian ambassador to Tanzania, Beatrice Van Hemeldonck, told AFP that a letter from Tanzania’s foreign ministry to the Belgian government said that under a bilateral treaty, “for the extradition to be effected the offence must have been committed within the territory of the requesting state.”
Ntuyahaga arrived in Tanzania in June last year and surrendered to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.
The maximum sentence this court can impose is life in a UN-approved prison somewhere around the globe.
In Rwanda, courts have handed down more than 1000 death sentences for genocide. Twenty-two of the condemned were executed in public in April last year. More than 120000 genocide suspects are in overcrowded prisons there awaiting trial.
The UN tribunal granted a prosecution request on March 18 to withdraw its indictment against Ntuyahaga for crimes against humanity. The prosecutor’s request was aimed at allowing a trial in Belgium, but the judges ruled they had no authority to deliver him to any national authorities.
The tribunal therefore released Ntuyahaga on March 29 in Dar es Salaam, where he was immediately re-arrested by the Tanzanian authorities. — AFP
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