BRUSSELS | Friday
A COURT in Brussels has found four Rwandans, including two Catholic nuns, guilty of taking part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide after a landmark eight week-long trial.
College teacher Vincent Ntezimana, 39, factory owner and former minister Alphonse Higaniro, 51, as well as nuns Consolata Mukangango, 42, and Julienne Mukabutera, 36, alias Sister Gertrude and Sister Maria Kizito, were accused of participating directly or indirectly in the genocide.
Their trial, which began April 17, was held under a landmark 1993 law that allows courts in Belgium -emdash- the former colonial power in Rwanda -emdash- to try Belgian residents, whatever their nationality, for crimes allegedly committed abroad.
All four defendants are now Belgian residents.
Between April and July 1994, Hutu extremist militiamen and then government troops systematically massacred up to 800_000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus before a Tutsi rebel front seized power and formed a new regime.
According to the indictment, Sisters Gertrude and Kizito handed 5_000 to 7_000 people who had been sheltering in their convent over to the extremist militia. Prosecutor Alain Winants, summing up in the precedent-setting case, said the accused had “provoked (and) ordered” killings, provided the means for murders to be carried out or simply failed to intervene.
The 12-member jury took eleven hours to find the defendants guilty on most of the 55 counts against them. It was split seven to five on some of the charges.
The jurors were due to meet later Friday (1100GMT) to decide on sentences for the four, who could face life imprisonment.
More than 200 witnesses were heard in the course of the trial, but lawyers for the defence rejected testimony of prosecution witnesses as a “pack of lies” and said many important witnesses had not been heard.
A farmer’s wife who survived the genocide said the nuns supplied petrol to Hutu extremists who torched a garage adjacent to the convent where 500 to 700 Tutsis were trapped.
The nuns, who were described by psychiatrists in the trial as having “fragile” personalities and suffering from post-traumatic stress, were found guilty on all the counts against them.
They told the court they had done everything in their power to protect the Tutsis hiding in the convent.
However, Sister Gertrude admitted that a Hutu militia chief had warned her in advance that Hutus were going to attack the convent but that she had told neither the refugees nor the other nuns of the warning in order “to avoid trouble”.
While the jury had to cope with events that happened more than 6_000 kilometres away, Belgian magistrates sought to make sure that the trial focused on the individual charges against the accused, and not Rwanda’s genocide as a whole. – AFP