ANTHONY MORLAND, Nairobi | Wednesday
JUST weeks before they were due to reach asylum in Australia after years of flight, two children related to a slain Rwandan president were murdered in Nairobi last week while in the protection of the UN refugee agency, UN, police and other sources said on Tuesday.
The lives of the two boys, aged 10 and nine, were reportedly taken quickly with a single deft knife slash to their necks in the early hours of Thursday morning as they lay in their beds in a supposedly secure UN accommodation centre in the Kenyan capital.
The children’s mother, a top priority refugee who had faced threats to her safety for at least two years, suffered severe stab wounds the same night but survived.
”Two children, one 10 years old, the other nine, both boys, were killed at an accommodation centre. Their mother was also wounded,” said Emmanual Nyabera, a representative for UN refugee agency UNCHR.
He said the woman was known to be at risk and that the three, who have not been named, had been due to be relocated shortly to Australia.
In a statement released on Tuesday, the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the mother, 43, was ”a close relative of the former president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana”, which was why she was thought to be in danger.
A Hutu, the mother was also at risk because she is married to a Tutsi.
HRW said three of the woman’s other children from an earlier marriage had already been murdered in Rwanda.
Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, was killed when his plane was shot down in April 1994. His death unleashed the orchestrated slaughter by extremist Hutus of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus over the next 100 days.
Policeman Peter Kimanthi said that a knife, presumably the murder weapon, had been recovered at the scene and that others among the 190 refugees in the centre were being questioned.
”When the area was inspected by police, there was no sign (the killer) came from outside,” he said.
No arrests had been made by Tuesday evening, he said.
He added that the mother had told police she had been blindfolded by the attacker and so could not describe or identify him.
Asked to comment on press reports that the two boys had been expertly killed with a single slash to an artery in the neck, causing near-instant death, Nyabera said this was ”a possibility”.
He confirmed that the two boys had been stabbed in exactly the same place on their bodies.
”The woman was stabbed in many places. She was struggling. She is now stable,” he said.
He added that there had been no signs of a break-in at the accommodation centre, which is administered by Irish aid agency Goal, and did not rule out that the murders had been committed by a resident.
HRW, which pointed out the woman had waited almost a year for her resettlement to be processed, said the case ”highlights the current failure of the UNHCR in Nairobi to provide speedy resettlement for refugees whose lives are at risk”.
”It is definitely embarrassing,” conceded Nyabera, ”but we are trying to learn from this. It is a challenge. We must come up with a better screening system and make sure this kind of thing does not happen again.”
Early last year, it emerged that the UNHCR’s resettlement system in Nairobi was riddled with corruption, with officials charging for supposedly free services and taking bribes. – Sapa-AFP